


Fancy Boy

by standalonefic



Category: The Hateful Eight (2015)
Genre: Alternate Universe - Canon Divergence, Fake/Pretend Relationship, Light BDSM, M/M, Period-Typical Homophobia, Period-Typical Racism, Revenge Sex, Romance
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-09-13
Updated: 2016-09-13
Packaged: 2018-08-14 22:37:21
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 40,767
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/8031643
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/standalonefic/pseuds/standalonefic
Summary: A few years before the movie, Chris Mannix comes up Marquis Warren's mountain, but he's after something other than the bounty.





	Fancy Boy

**Author's Note:**

> I could never have written this if thedevilchicken hadn't written [Misery Acquaints](http://archiveofourown.org/works/6488983) first: I read it right after I watched the movie, and its amazing, pitch-perfect portrayal of this ship reworked my brain and definitely influenced me a lot.
> 
> I bent the timeline in an increasingly pretzel-like shape as this went on--it's a few years before the film, but Warren and John Ruth have already formed their acquaintance.
> 
> Additional warnings for racial slurs (single use), violence (including past torture), and discussion of rape.
> 
> Anyway, this is basically a romance novel about Reconstruction-era murderers. With thanks to my two pre-readers, who gave me a lot of reassurance.

“You’re telling me you’re the genuine blood-relation son of Erskine Mannix? I ain’t never heard tell of no Chris, but Erskine, now, that’s a name worth remembering.”

White boy about licked his lips at that, of all the fucking things, and back he rocked onto his heels, but didn’t stop smiling even when Warren followed his forehead with the pistol ‘cause there was no getting away from him that easy.

“Came to me _any_ nigger in the wide _world_ like to be familiar with him,” Mannix the Fucking Younger said.

Warren pulled back the hammer. “Let fly with that word one more time and I don’t fuck around any more with curiosity.”

“Well, yes, sir, black major. Black major _is_ acceptable, ain’t it, major?”

“Suppose as a stop-gap measure it’ll do. Now, I’ve killed a lot of Confederate boys over the years—”

That crazy smile of his only got wider. “Reckon you _have_.”

“—but I can’t say as I ever had one saunter up blithe as morning and not start blubbering with a gun barrel between their eyes. Suppose I’m in the mood to let you live as long as it’d take to explain yourself.”

“Sounds to me like good reason to talk slow.”

“I can see it might,” Warren said, “but a lack of patience pulls a trigger quicker than a surfeit of intrigue stays it, and that’s what you have to figure on.”

Even that didn’t wipe the shit-eating grin off white boy’s face. “I ain’t come up this mountainside to kill you, black major, _no, sir_.”

“You’re a damn liar.”

“It’s the God’s honest.”

“Then what the hell are you here for? Just plumb crazy? Just looking to get yourself shot?”

White boy said, “How’d you like your johnson sucked for free by a Reb marauder’s son?”

Warren stood there for a minute and then, slowly, lowered the hammer and took the barrel of his pistol off Chris Mannix’s forehead. It had left a little circle there.

“Hell,” he said, “and it ain’t even my birthday.”

“Now, it’s a niche interest, I know,” Mannix said, not bothering to get up, as he wouldn’t if the business he’d come for was best transacted on his knees anyhow, “but men have done stranger things. The way I see it, incentive for you, ‘side from getting your pecker in the mouth of a white man, which has _got_ to be a rare damn opportunity to say the least, is striking back by stroking. Easiest thing in the world to do, given all my _daddy’s_ done to fellows look an awful lot like you. _And,_ if you need a _further_ sales pitch, I—”

“Got a mouth like a ten-dollar whore, yeah, I can tell that just from looking at you.”

“Know what to do is what I was _going_ to say.” That was the first time the smile flickered, which Warren filed away as somehow interesting, though interesting for what and to whom he didn’t know, or why he gave a damn at all. “Do we have us a deal, _black major_?”

“Hold on just a minute,” Warren said. “Now, wouldn’t surprise me none to hear that tales of my pecker spread wide and far, but _even to me_ it seems a mite strange that Erskine Mannix’s son would be so desperate for a lick of it that he’d cross state lines and who knows what else, in the fucking snow. And I ain’t keen to get my parts bitten off by a kill-crazy white boy, however much defiling his pretty throat might warm me up inside. So if we’re gonna have us a deal, you’re gonna tell me why.”

“That strikes me as a question some might call immaterial, offered a free suck.”

“Say I’m suspicious on account of I got ancestors once offered a free boat ride.”

“You did _and how_ ,” Chris Mannix said, grinning again, but the look had gone as hard as tin. Crazy, maybe, but not quite addle-brained, which didn’t change things much: Warren didn’t want to stick his privates in crazy, clear-thinking or no.

He leveled the pistol again. “Answer the damn question or I’ll strike back at your daddy by fucking a bullet wound right between your eyes.”

“That there’s the kind of impulsive behavior earns fifty thousand dollar bounties,” Mannix said. He closed his eyes. “Say I got my own reasons for wanting to humiliate my daddy.”

“Shit, and you’re how old?”

“Thirty-four.”

“Man gets to be thirty-four and he wants to humiliate his daddy, he might as well kill him.”

“Killing’s short. Knowing his son took the Mannix name, went out to Wyoming and became the _genuine by-choice fancy boy_ of _Major Marquis Warren_ , that stings one _hell_ of a lot longer.” He paused. “Anyways you ain’t so old yourself. What are you, forty-five, fifty? They do say you can never tell with black folk.”

“’Cause down where you’re from, black folks don’t live so long. Fifty-two. Near two decades on you’s enough to opine how you ought to be wiping your own ass by now.”

“My ass is off-limits, black major.”

“Suppose I took it anyhow,” Warren said, almost amused. “I got the pistol. Pistol determines which of us gets to dictate terms.”

“Yankees done an awful lot of batshit, ignorant, and just plain nutsack-in-the-wind _stupid_ over the years, but I doubt even _they_ bump up to major a man who can’t figure that a _willing_ cocksucker son’s more a black eye on a Dixie hero than an _unwilling_ cornholed one.”

Warren considered that. “Might be that’s true.”

“Might be, hell, true and you _know_ it. Now, Major, I can jaw with the best of them, if you’re so inclined, but what do you say we get down to what _else_ my mouth can do?”

“I got it now,” Warren said. “Somebody else heard tell what that mouth of yours can do, didn’t they?” He’d been about to take the pistol away again but the look in Chris Mannix’s eyes made him keep it level, his finger light against the burnished iron of the trigger. “Yeah, it comes to me now. You got caught and got drummed out, didn’t you? Inasmuch as a ragged-ass, penny-ante bunch of murderers and rapists and thieves got drums and fifes to drum you. Coat stripped off you. Run for your life. I got the picture of it right?”

“That’s about the size of it.” Eyes said it somehow wasn’t, maybe even not by half, but Warren decided not to pay them any mind. White boys always thought their stories ought to run long. So he let the hammer down and decided, free sucking on the afternoon’s menu after all, that he was in a mood to be gracious: he put down one hand and helped the white boy up.

“I prefer taking my prick out indoors, especially in inclement weather,” Warren said. “You don’t mind?”

Mannix weighed it and then shook his head. “Knees were getting cold anyhow.”

Warren led him inside the house and—hell with it—took the cap off a bottle and poured them a couple of drinks. He toasted Mannix. “To the ruination of your daddy, then.”

“To my fucking mouth,” Mannix said, and drank.

 _To me fucking your mouth_ , Warren thought, which he had to admit was an intriguing prospect now he was working at an eighty percent certainty Mannix wouldn’t bite off his dingus like a piece of stick candy. It’d been a long time since he’d had any piece of ass at all. But he ain’t never worked it out this cold-bloodedly before and, besides that, never at all with a white boy.

Even Mannix seemed to feel the situation had gotten out-of-joint. He helped himself to another glass of Warren’s liquor, which ordinarily would have ben a shooting offense all on its own, but the situation being what it was, Warren allowed it.

Mannix slammed that drink back too and then said, “Suppose we ought to be getting on with it.”

“Suppose so.”

Mannix scraped the chair across the floor dragging it over, and Warren held up a hand and stayed him.

“Occurs to me that when you tell this story to your daddy, or someone else does, might be best if you were truthful about being down on your knees.”

“Oh, occurs to you now, does it,” Mannix said, like he hadn’t just been down on them outside. “I do that, I went that serape over there to kneel down on.”

“Take it, then.”

Mannix slung it off its hook, folded it several times into a thick wadded bar of cloth, and lined it up neat as a line of chicken feed right in front of Warren’s chair. The business of how he did it shouldn’t have had any effect but somehow did, especially once Chris Mannix got down on his knees on it and rocked back and forth a little to settle it flat. Warren put one hand in the white boy’s hair and Mannix looked up, half-smiling and half-scowling through those big teeth of his.

“Like I _said_ , black major,” he drawled, “seems to me this is one _advantageous_ arrangement.” He stroked his thumb over Warren’s bulge. “Seems to me it seems so to you too.”

Warren got himself out and curled his fingers tight in that hair and pushed him down. “Why don’t you prove to me you can do something other than talk.”

Mannix did. Warren had been right about his mouth, too: warm, willing, and practiced. He supposed he must’ve had better over the years, but he couldn’t have said exactly when, and Mannix had been right enough that there was a special pleasure in looking down at that white boy’s head bobbing up and down on him and knowing it was Erskine Mannix’s son doing that slavering and sucking. He thrust up, humping wild, fucking Mannix’s throat, and Mannix sputtered a little but let him, his fingers tightening on Warren’s hips, maybe figuring it was best to split the difference between his pretty tongue-work and giving himself over to just be a hot little willing cuspidor for Warren’s spunk.

Warren slowed down, though—not wanting to get ahead of himself—and somehow they worked out something akin to a rhythm of fast and slow. Mannix didn’t seem in any hurry to quit. Warren looked down at him, at his puffed-out cheeks and the sweat of exertion at his temples, the ripe fucking peach of his skin, the pink of his mouth, long girlish eyelashes ought to have been a giveaway about his proclivities.

He yanked a little harder at Mannix’s hair and Mannix came up off him for the first time, his eyes half-black, his mouth overripe like fruit, and Warren thrust the thumb of his right hand into Mannix’s mouth and watched Mannix suck on that, his eyes half-closed, for just a second or two before the throb of his untouched johnson got to be too much to bear. He shoved Mannix back down and he heard one of Mannix’s knees skid off the blanket and hit the floor.

Didn’t matter to either one of them. Mannix sucked hard, taking control of it all, pushing his hand flat against Warren’s belly when Warren tried to grind further into him. He seemed to be threatening to suck Warren inside-out. Then he flicked the flat of his tongue against the tip and Warren came hard, hard enough for his vision to shutter in dark around the edges, hard enough for his ears to ring, and Mannix split the difference there, too: let it all mostly hit the floor but then thought better of it, thought of the point he wanted so bad to prove, and smeared some on his hand and licked it off like the spunk was honey.

He was hard himself. Warren said, hoarsely, “Don’t expect me to do shit about that. You can take care of that on your own.”

“Don’t want your hands on me anyhow,” Mannix said, with Warren’s stuff still all over his mouth and hand. Fucker even turned away while he worked himself out, like Warren would want a peek.

“That’s gonna get all over the floor.”

“Well, then you can wipe it up,” Mannix said without turning around.

Warren reached for the gun again and made sure Mannix could hear the hammer getting lifted. “Ain’t a thing stopping me from killing you now and still saying what you done for me first.”

“Corroboration.” Mannix’s hand was only working faster. Warren could see his elbow jerking.

“What is that, you pulling yourself even harder with me talking about killing you?”

“If you can’t shut up,” Mannix said, his voice thinned out a little like his teeth were gritted, “least you could do is say something fucking helpful.”

Never let it be said he’d take bad manners so far as to not do that, especially with bells still in his ears. But: “Say you’ll wipe down my floor first.”

“Aww, dammit.” He sounded truly petulant. “I’ll wipe—down—the fucking—floor.”

“Might have to use your mouth again,” Warren said. “Wasn’t a lie, you saying you knew what to do, and stiff as it got you, seems to me the real lie was you saying your ass wasn’t part of the deal. You know what I think, Chris Mannix? I think you’d like me to spit on my fingers and open you wide—get you slick up inside till you were begging for it. Then have you suck me with your asshole gaping open until you couldn’t stand it anymore, and I’d bend you over, slide into you all wet from your own mouth. Any man who’d hike his way up a damn mountain to hand out a free suck is just _waiting_ —”

Mannix’s back jerked and his arm stilled.

Warren laughed heartily. “Go on, white boy. Rags are in a pile over yonder.”

Mannix stood up like a puppet with his strings being pulled, and Warren was ready to shoot him, but damned if he didn’t really mop up his own spending and then, standing there with a twisted look of indecision on his face, come over even and wiped up what there was of Warren’s. Which was interesting. He held up the rag then, eyebrows raised, and Warren nodded at the midden barrel. Mannix tossed it in and then wiped his hands down the length of his shirt.

“Well,” he said, “it’s been something.”

“Both our purposes accomplished,” Warren allowed.

Mannix’s hand drifted up like he was going to tug on the brim of his hat, but then he either remembered he wasn’t wearing one or remembered who he was talking to. A hell of a grin spread across his face. “I ain’t the only one done that before.”

“We were doing different things.”

“Now, I know they say it’s all the same in the dark, but I don’t think you _was_ pretending, black major. You got a history with pecker same as me.”

“That’s the kind of assertion likely to result in a bullet to the brain.”

“And if it didn’t?”

“If it didn’t, I could might allow I’d dabbled. Non-exclusive to pussy, you understand, but, ah, pussy’s hard to find out here. That being said, there’s some as would view fucking another man as a last resort, dire straits kind of thing—chance of getting myself hanged aside, I ain’t particular that way.”

Mannix nodded, almost thoughtfully. “Never really saw the skirt I much wanted to lift, but—”

“I didn’t ask,” Warren said. “Isn’t it about time for you to get yourself gone, anyhow?”

Mannix looked out the window. His lip curled. “It’s getting on dark.”

“Didn’t ask for an account of the time neither.”

“Now, come on, black major, that was a better cocksucking than you’d any right to think you’d get when you woke up this morning, wasn’t it? Doesn’t that entitle me to put head to pillow just this night and get my bearings in the mornings when I won’t freeze my _balls_ off getting down this fucking mountain?”

Warren considered it. It was true that the blowjob had cleaned him out—felt like it had lifted spunk out of himself had been all the way back in his fucking heels—and brightened one hell of a sorry winter day, especially coming as it did with the knowledge that he’d bruised the pretty lips of Erskine Mannix’s cast-out cocksucker son. “Hand over that pistol of yours and maybe we can talk about it.”

Mannix flexed a smile at him. “Nope.”

“Then it’s no deal, white boy.”

“I ain’t asked you to take off yours.”

“It’s my house, isn’t it?”

“All the sons of the South who came up here to make their fortune off your head, you’ve buried plenty of white boys around this mountain. I got no intention of being one of them. I’d rather take my chances in the fucking snow—but then if I die, you’ll have to track my body down in the morning, lest some _passerby_ wonder who kicked me out of shelter in the middle of the coldest damn November _I_ ever saw. How do they feel about you ‘round here, anyway, major? Good enough they’d overlook you letting me freeze?”

“How’d they prove I knew?”

“Oh, I’d write it down. _And_ getting you well-hung in the bargain, saying what transpired in this room. So either that’s you dead, twice-over, or it’s you dragging your ass all over this mountainside looking for my corpse, _or_ you let me stay the night, armed but peaceable.”

He outweighed Chris Mannix, anyhow, and had a couple inches on him; all the dead bounties in the world hadn’t made him a sound late-in-life sleeper, not with his past. Besides, if Mannix killed him, there wouldn’t be as much use running to tell daddy what he’d done. “If I let myself get talked into doing something that stupid, I’d expect to get my ashes hauled in the morning in payment.”

Mannix had that hard-as-tin look again, though, and it made his face look completely different. “I ain’t no whore.”

“And I ain’t no gracious host. It’s your gun or your mouth or I’ll chance taking the long walk looking for your frozen ass come sun-up.”

Chris Mannix hesitated and then unbuckled his holster and passed it over. Warren took it and scolded himself for being damn fool enough to be disappointed by the choice. After that, they didn’t talk for a couple-three hours because what the fuck was there to say? Warren fried up some ham and made enough for two because it was easier to cook it all than listen to Mannix bitch and whine. Mannix didn’t compliment him on it or anything that would’ve shown basic good manners, but he did scrape his fork around on the plate and get every last bit of gravy and grease up into his mouth, the downside of which was that it got Warren thinking about his mouth again, which was no good. He stood up.

“Horses need feeding. Are you fit to help with that, or is it beneath your delicate sensibilities?”

“I can help,” Mannix said.

He was passable with the animals, which was the best thing Warren could’ve been persuaded to say about him. Then again, he’d probably learned it all being stable boy for Mannix’s Marauders, which tended to sour the impression.

Funnily enough they didn’t quarrel any about the bed. Mannix still didn’t seem to feel like talking: just gathered up the furs and blankets Warren pointed him at and made up a raggedy-ass camp bed for himself on the floor. He’d almost nuzzled down into it when his head popped up again like a gopher’s out of a hole. “Want to get jerked off to help you sleep?”

Huh. “Could ease my mind.”

So Mannix stood before him while he sat on the edge of the bed, and Mannix spat on his palm and worked him steadily and slowly. He had a look of utter concentration about him that was almost cute, like giving out this handjob was akin to detail work on some fussy little cabinet or the like. But his movements were sure and practiced—he’d done this thing before exactly, then. Warren wanted to get that look off his face. He thought about putting his fingers in Mannix’s mouth again and feeling Mannix give suck to them, his face turned hard against Warren’s palm, but before he could actually do it he went and came. Mannix didn’t lick any of it up this time, either, just got another rag for it. He brought himself off into it over there in the corner and then tossed it onto the heap.

“Be gone in the morning,” he said, “so you take those out and breathe in when you want to remember me.”

“Why’d I want to remember you,” Warren said.

Mannix nestled into the pile of blankets and rolled around in them until he’d made a tube with himself at the center, a bullet in a barrel, his hair sticking out all crazy from one end like a rooster’s comb. “I was just saying.”

“Shut the fuck up with saying anything and let me sleep.”

He opened his eyes a lot that night even though Mannix did abide by the shutting-the-fuck-up rule. He just plain wasn’t used to having another person around—leastwise not another living one, and it crossed his mind to get some halfway decent shut-eye by killing Mannix while he slept. But the sound of the wind whipping snow around outside decided him on that front. Cold would mostly keep the body from stinking, but he didn’t want to go out to freeze it a decent interval from the house. And he didn’t have any good memories of sharing space with human flesh gone maggoty.

Mannix slept like a stone and Warren finally kicked him awake around nine in the morning just because he was sick of Mannix being able to sleep when he couldn’t.

“The hell is it?”

“Blizzard,” Warren said.

Mannix rubbed his eyes. “You’ve got those lines strung up outside already.”

“I’m saying blizzard means we’re stuck with each other, and I don’t want to spend three days listening to you snore.”

“You black bastard. I ain’t slept that good in weeks.”

“Probably plumb tired yourself out working over my dingus. Speaking of.”

“You tear me out of bed and then think I’m gonna fall all over you with gratitude? You want fucking, fuck yourself.”

“I ain’t what you’d call unreasonable. Got fried bread and some more of last night’s ham to offer up in trade.”

“I told you,” Mannix said. “This ain’t that kind of arrangement.” He sat up and stretched, looking like a cat on somebody’s porch leisurely drawing itself out. The cold hit him and made him shiver a little. “What one feller does with another, even a _black_ feller, isn’t anybody else’s business, least of all _George Washington’s_.”

“You figure yourself only worth a dollar? Hell, I’d have paid more than that.”

Of all the fucking things, that seemed to cheer Mannix up a little out of his mood. He sniffed the air and got the scent of ham, which lifted him up onto his feet and over towards the skillet. He poked at the bubbling slices merrily sizzling along in their own fat.

“What’s up your ass about not being on a whoring streak, anyhow?” Warren said, observing him. “And what’d you come up here to make yourself, if that wasn’t it?”

Flushing or the heat off the stove or both had turned Mannix’s cheeks almost scarlet. “Fancy boy.”

“And a fancy boy ain’t a whore.”

“A fancy boy does it because he likes it.”

“A genuine, by-choice fancy boy for Major Marquis Warren. That’s the word you want to get back to your daddy. I can’t say as it has an unappealing ring to it. Then again, right now there’s no one here but us, so who’s to know the difference?”

“Dammit, _I’d_ know, wouldn’t I?”

“Suppose that’s true. Suppose I give you breakfast anyway, and every other meal square for the time you’re snowed in, which I’d reckon at two, three days. My odds of you ‘doing it because you like it’ improve at all?”

“Relative to if you starved me?”

“Relative to.”

“Major, you’re giving me a headache,” Mannix said. A little furrow had worked its way between his brows and looked deep enough to slot a coin into. “’Course I wouldn’t feel like if I was getting starved out, but if I _do_ feel like it, it’s not gonna be any kind of straightforward reciprocal gesture, is my point. I’m stuck here for three days, ain’t I? I got needs, too.”

Warren decided to err on the side of ensuring himself a halfway decent blowjob by not bringing up that Mannix’s needs evidently included getting another man’s cock in his mouth in addition to satisfying himself—he could give that to white boy as food for fucking thought on his way out the fucking door. In the meantime, he served up the ham and grease-sopped bread, and Mannix left off eating halfway through with an, “All right, damn you,” and knelt down—no fooling around with the serape this time—and sucked Warren off with his mouth still steamed-up from breakfast.

And then they went back to eating. Mannix got real pointed as to how the breakfast didn’t have anything to do with the other thing and then stormed off to look after the horses. When he came back in, he smelled like them, outdoorsy, sort of, and there was snow matted on his clothes and he was shaking like a madman. Warren drank coffee and thought about ways to warm him up, but in the end only gave him the coffee. It would be bad, he thought, to set that kind of precedent, acting like he gave a damn Mannix was warm, when really he just wanted to fuck him until the snow jumped out of his hair. Mannix was liable to misread it.

“A man could freeze his prick off in that,” Mannix said, after he’d pointedly shivered and shuddered in front of the fire a while.

“Didn’t ask you to go out in it.”

“I pull my share of the weight.”

“Yeah, that’s what you hear about Southerners, y’all are purely invested in pulling your own weight, kind of people’d never bring anybody over in chains to pull it for you.”

“Nobody in my neck of the woods could have afforded to anyhow,” Mannix said, unbothered by this. “Not that we wouldn’t have tried. Who the hell wouldn’t? You’d do it yourself if you thought you could get away it—or do you think burning men’s closer to heaven than owning them?”

“Matter of fact, I do.”

“Well, that’s horseshit. Dead is dead and alive is better.”

“Strange words from a man planning on getting his revenge the slow way.”

Mannix opened his mouth and then closed it and then a mask of foolishness descended on him and he became a lot less interesting, and Warren didn’t have a lot of interest in him to lose. “Now, major, we don’t have to _have conversations_ , do we? Suss out where each of us stands on this and that? I’d have thought the benefit of this type arrangement is we both know where the other’s got his feet planted.”

“Which in your case is in Dixie, right or wrong.”

“Which in _your_ case ought to be _hanging_ and _dancing_ from the nearest tree, with all those boys you burned up in a mass grave behind you.”

“That’d be your part in it too, the federal government had its way,” Warren said. “Or do you expect me to believe you sat at home, all those nights before your daddy caught onto how you are, and just waved all those white-sheeted boys on their way as they want out to raze and burn and do themselves a spot of murder?”

Mannix kept that cockeyed grin of his, but now there was a razor’s edge behind it. “That’d be the gallows, not the tree, black major. But it’d be the gallows for us both anyway, wouldn’t it?” He puffed out his cheeks and mimed how he’d accompanied his breakfast. “Isn’t that a kind of consolation?”

“Almost, if I’m in the right mood.”

“That settles it, then. What have you got for entertainment around here anyhow? I can’t spend three days with only your johnson to keep me occupied, or your skin’ll peel back off it like a banana.”

“Better hope it doesn’t,” Warren said, “or, that image holds true, you’d find it was white underneath and your daddy wouldn’t be half so pissed off as you’re hoping.” He turned and kicked the pile of blankets, which was less satisfying now that Chris Mannix wasn’t there to be kicked along with them. “Get this shit off my floor and I’ll find a deck of cards.”

“As much as you’re after me cleaning up your floor all the time, you ought to pay a woman to come in and housekeep for you.” But he gathered up the furs and blankets and stacked them more or less where he’d gotten them to begin with, giving each of them a fond pat as he laid them down.

Warren found the cards, which were a little bent at the corners but could still be shuffled. They took turns dealing blackjack.

“You’re counting,” Mannix grumbled.

“Whole point of the game _is_ to count, white boy.”

“How come you get to keep calling me that and I can’t call you—you know?”

“’Cause I’m the one with the gun.” He dealt out Mannix’s first card, a six. “And you never complained about it before.”

“Well, I don’t like it.”

“Well, I don’t really give a shit, _white boy_. Hit or stay.”

Mannix tapped the table and got a nine for his troubles. He met Warren’s eyes directly. “What you think, then, _black_ major? Fifteen’s a troublesome number in this game.”

“I don’t give a fuck you hit or stay as long as you do it quickly. You’ve got nothing on the table anyhow.”

“Suppose I did.”

Warren’s heartbeat quickened a little, which was stupid. He dealt himself another card and flattened out at eighteen: no point going further. “And what would that be?”

“Give me a winning tip and I’ll give you those two little words your side of the war loved so very, very much: _unconditional surrender_.”

Warren drummed his fingers lightly against the cards. “Another thing: white boy’s what you might call a neutral descriptor. I ain’t quarreling with ‘black major,’ you’ll notice. That’s just a fucking adjective followed by a fucking noun.”

Mannix scowled. “That you turning down my offer?”

“I don’t recall your side taking unconditional surrenders much to heart. Your daddy and you being a case in point. How do I know, I give you a good tip and you come out ahead, you’ll keep your word?”

“Bad enough being inclined to suck cock,” Mannix said. “I don’t like giving anybody room to call me a _liar_ , too.”

“All cocksuckers are liars. Lie to their women, their friends, family, the law.”

“I suppose you would know.”

“I suppose I would. And what makes you think your ass is such an incentive I’d be thinking of tipping you one way or another anyhow?”

Mannix’s smile was more blinding than the sun off the fucking snow. “’Cause we’re still talking about it, ain’t we?”

They were. Warren of course had been cheating him the whole time—it was bad luck plain and simple to play a straight game of cards with a white man—and he knew to a damn certainty that the next card he’d turn would be a seven, giving Chris Mannix a natural twenty-one. That didn’t simplify things. There were still too many ways it could go, whether he gave Mannix the right answer or not, whether Mannix listened or not. No safe way to thread that needle where he came out getting ass-play and a humbled white boy for sure and certain. Well, what was life, if not one risk after another?

“Hit that bitch.”

The smile faltered. Fucking coward cracker _motherfucker_. “I do believe I’ll stay,” Chris Mannix said.

Warren shrugged like it had never mattered to him one way or the other. He flipped the card. Mannix got a look at that seven and blanched, his eyes the size of saucers.

“If you winning would’ve got me the right to bugger you senseless,” Warren said, “remind me what _me_ winning was supposed to get me? ‘Cause that’s you at fifteen and me three points ahead, _and_ having proved you a mistrustful, yellow-bellied type of cocksucker, which I’ll grant is its own kind of victory.”

“Maybe I get the right to bugger _you_ senseless,” Mannix said. “Thinking about it switched ‘round like that.”

“A good try.” In fact, it did make him laugh a little. “But as a matter of principle, I’ve gotten my life fucked enough by white men without volunteering my ass for it in the bargain.” But it did bring Mannix’s cock to mind. “Counter-proposal would be you take yourself out right here and now and let me get a good look at what you’ve been fooling with all on your lonesome.”

Mannix chewed on his lower lip a little, almost bashful, and then nodded. He undid the long row of buttons at his fly and produced himself.

Nothing special, to Warren’s mind. He’d seen bigger, he’d seen better. But it was a workable thing, and having it out in the air did make a pretty flush rise up in Mannix’s face. He was stiffening right quick, too, which lent some more interest to the proceedings. He turned his head away, like the sight of his pecker all up and shamelessly begging for a black man’s attentions was too much to bear. Sight still averted, he said, “That a good enough look?”

“Oh, yeah, fifteen seconds of free-dicking it in on your part’s a decent trade for what I lost,” Warren said, and Mannix’s blush deepened, turned almost raspberry. “Touch yourself. No,” when Mannix tried to tilt his hips away, hunch over himself as he brought himself to hand, “head back, like you’re getting blown and loving it, lips open. Face forward.”

“You’re awfully bossy, major,” Mannix said, but he rearranged himself in his chair. His eyes were half-closed, but his mouth was half-open, as instructed. It wasn’t a bad picture. “You gonna match me stroke for stroke on yourself?”

“If the mood takes me. I don’t see as how you pleasuring yourself is compelling enough to necessitate it.”

“Oh, you _don’t_?” He opened his eyes a little wider and tried to lean forward, head up to get a look at Warren’s nethers.

“See? No reason not to doubt that unconditional surrender of yours if you can’t even keep to a pose.”

Mannix leaned back again. With his head thrown back, his throat seemed to be begging for someone to bruise it, with fingerprints or purple-red bites. Warren had been with light-skinned men before who marked up red easily, but for all he knew, on Mannix it’d all show up like a fireworks display on Independence Day.

Mannix was stroking himself furiously and then he caught his lip up between his teeth again. “Dammit. Can I spit in my hand, or have you got a rule about that, too?”

“Nah, get yourself wet if you’ve got a mind for it.”

“Oh, many thanks.” He hawked up into his palm and resumed his work, each pull coming easier then. Warren considered telling him to slow down—he could talk Mannix through every second of it and he had the feeling Mannix would do as he said—but he kind of liked seeing how shameless Mannix was once he forgot himself. His hips punched up into his hand with every decent stroke, his ass coming fully up off the chair.

“Your lips are so red you look like you’ve been sucking on a strawberry,” Warren said.

Mannix was a little breathless. “When really I just been sucking on you, isn’t that right?”

“Why I don’t need to match you. You gonna duck your responsibilities again?”

“No, sir, major.”

He liked that “sir,” wouldn’t mind hearing it again.

“Finish up and get your ass over here.”

Mannix sped up but kept the pose, humping off the last of it into his palm and ending with a gasp.

“Lick it off,” Warren told him.

He looked doubtful about it. “That’s nasty, major.” Like he hadn’t already swallowed down about a quart of Warren’s. A hard couple of seconds of level staring got his hand up to his mouth and he licked his fingers clean, making a little bit too much of a face.

Warren laughed. “You’re a bad actor, white boy. You don’t mind the taste of that at all.” The look on Mannix’s face as he didn’t bother denying it cured Warren of the last of his bitterness over that wet fart of a blackjack game, at least, and he freed himself from his trousers and spread his legs so Mannix would come over. Mannix walked and dragged his chair, which was fresh disappointment. Warren would have liked him crawling for it. That would have been just fine.

*

The next day, Mannix got up first and made biscuits that weren’t half-bad. He was quiet the whole time and Warren let him be: he could be stir-crazy all by his lonesome same as he would be if Mannix had never shown his stupid calf-eyed face in the first place. He read dime novels and looked up from time to time to watch Mannix bounce off the walls like an impatient colt. It was well-past noon before white boy settled in with pen and paper and took to writing a letter to he-wouldn’t-say-who. He chewed over that letter like a beaver building a dam.

In the evening, they played cards again, poker that time, and instead of betting touches, they bet chores, dusting and sweeping and scrubbing things down in the kitchen. Mannix mostly lost.

None of which was to say they weren’t still touching each other, because if Mannix got any more cock in his mouth his jaw was gonna drop off at the hinge. Warren even condescended to bring him off once, towards the end of the day, when he was starting to decide that Mannix in a funk was even less appealing than Mannix out of one. It wasn’t all bad. He wasn’t half-crazed about pecker the way Mannix seemed to be, but he’d always liked the feel of it fine, the napped-velvet of the skin in its fine wrinkles, the heat, the easiness of stirring up a man when you had your hands on him like that. White men didn’t seem to be any different in that regard, not that Warren had really figured they would be. Mannix was louder about getting touched than anyone Warren had been with before—closest comparison really would be a whore who wanted to make sure he got his money’s worth by giving him hoots and hollers per dollar, and for whatever reason, he wasn’t in the mood to pick a fight with Mannix by bringing whoring up again. But that was really what Mannix was like. He gasped and wriggled and keened and sighed and cussed and said, “Oh, yes, major, yes, _sir_ , just that way.”

But aside from that he was creepy quiet.

“Not that my ears ain’t been grateful,” Warren said finally, “but I’ve seen a couple men go the way you’re going and it always ends in bloodshed.”

Mannix was sitting there methodically tearing another draft of his letter into itsy-bitsy pieces. “Oh, and what way is that, major?”

“Not exactly the strong and silent type, are you? Generally, I mean?”

“Just don’t see any point in us talking each other to death.”

“You an expert in points now?” He kicked the leg of the table. “Who’s the damn letter to?”

“None of your damn business.”

“It’s my house and it’s my fucking paper you’re wasting fucking it up every ten minutes.”

“Giving me a rubdown don’t entitle you to every thought that passes through my head.”

“Well, this thought seems to be idling a while.”

“I blow you again, will that shut you up?”

“I’m about blown out for the day, Chris Mannix. I’m all out of stuff to shoot. You try again and I’m liable to end up filling your mouth up with blood. Piss or bone marrow, maybe. Nothing even you’d be happy to get.”

Mannix made a face that tempted Warren to laugh at it. He balled up the paper again and tossed it into the fireplace. With some effort, that rubbery expression of his bounced back into some kind of dumbass smile. He slapped the table. “Well, I ain’t gonna chase you around the room to get my hands on your nutsack, major, if you don’t _want_ to come, I sure can’t _make_ you. So what’s left for us to do? You gonna read to me?”

Warren weighed both sides of it—continuing to press Mannix about the letter and maybe getting a fistfight might liven things up a little, but it also might give him a couple of busted teeth, because even though he could have whipped that boy into the ground in the usual way of things, nobody could figure on what kind of strength a lunatic might have in him.

He lobbed a book at Mannix. “You read, and I’ll knock off some of those chores you accumulated getting your ass righteously handed to you at poker.”

“Well, that sounds like quite the bargain.” Mannix licked his finger and flipped through. “Where’d you leave off?”

“Surprise me.”

“You don’t mind picking up at the wrong spot?”

“The damned things are all the same anyhow. I wouldn’t keep buying them except nothing else makes the wagon trip out here. Had a couple I read back-to-front, just for variety. I wouldn’t expect your inbred Southern ass to make sense of it that way, though, so as a favor to you, you can read it in order.”

“I can about buy none of the boys who found you having gotten the drop on you,” Mannix said, head down as he scoured through the pages looking for someplace interesting, “but nobody having _shot_ you as was _acquainted_ with you is a little more of a mystery and a puzzlement. Here we go, black major. ‘Killing Dwight Douglas had saved Mary Meacham’s life, but even as our hero was feted with fireworks and chicken dinners in the small town of Willow-on-the-Creek, trouble was brewing on Douglas’s homestead. His no-account thief of a brother…”

He had a halfway decent voice for that kind of thing, and once he got into it, he did the voices a little, which Warren considered making fun of but then didn’t because he sort of liked it.

Mannix read a couple of chapters and then whined for water, like his legs were broken and he couldn’t go get a drink his own self. Warren got him one on account of how this was the most interested he’d been in one of those books the whole time he’d been out in the middle of buttfuck nowhere Wyoming, but he didn’t go to any trouble making sure the cup was clean. Happy medium, he figured. Mannix got within thirty pages of the ending before throwing the book to the side and declaring he couldn’t see straight. His voice was a rasp by then.

“I can finish it in the morning. You might be one of those types don’t care how things resolve—”

“He’s gonna kill the bandits and rescue that soppy white girl.”

“—but _I_ ,” Mannix continued, chin up, “want to see _how_ he kills the bandits and rescues that soppy white—the lady. Fuck _you_ , black major.”

“In the morning you ain’t even going to be here, storm will be cleared up, roads passable. You can fuck off back to Dixieland.” Though it came to him that Mannix probably couldn’t go back to Dixie, or at least not back to any part of it he knew. “Where the hell are you going, anyway? You came all the way up here, you gonna go all the way back? You find any spot of civilization down in the land of cotton with a dozen people in it, they’re gonna know your daddy. Which means word will eventually get around about your proclivities.”

“What the fuck is a proclivity?”

“Your fondness for dingus would qualify.”

“Maybe that’s so. What’s it matter to you? You going to weep and rue and tear your clothes for me when they string me behind those horses and ride till my skull’s pulped like an apple in a cider press? You gonna come get righteous vengeance for me account ‘a how I sucked your dick so well?”

“I’ve had better.”

Mannix sneered a little, like he didn’t believe that was so.

“It’s nothing to me where you go,” Warren said, returning to the fucking point. “I’m just saying you’re gonna live the rest of your life in suspense over the end of this here book. Hell, take it with you. Consider it a going-away and getting-the-fuck-out-of-my-life present.”

“You’re being sarcastic,” Chris Mannix said, “but I’m gonna take that as a promise,” and he picked the book off the floor and brushed the dust off its cover with prissy precision. He acted like that was the end of the conversation about where he’d go in the morning, like slipping the book between two of the blankets of his bed on the floor for safekeeping meant something.

Warren, not ready to sleep, and not so attached to any book he’d take one under the covers with him, stayed awake and turned things over in his head.

The way he figured it, though this could’ve just been because the storm and the free sucks and the stir had bamboozled him somehow, it almost seemed like what made the most sense for both of them was Mannix hanging around.

He had to beg his common sense to hear him out on that one.

Persuading it he had a fair case kept him up long enough to hear Mannix hit a rough patch of dreams. Warren listened in, curious, but there wasn’t much to hear, beyond Mannix tossing and turning and muttering into his pillow, the mutterings themselves pretty much useless, his voice slurry from sleep. He figured it would pass—his always had, back when he used to get them—but it was a damn trial waiting it out, with Mannix so fucking noisy and riotous, kicking and tangling himself up in the blankets. Warren had half a mind to wake him up, but he didn’t want to have to deal with all that. After about an hour, it smoothed itself out.

*

Warren pitched it to him in the morning, won over into full complicity with his own plan by the sight of Chris Mannix making flapjacks, which were at least on par with his biscuits from the day before. Warren’s own skills in the kitchen were pretty damn limited.

This morning saw Mannix back to his usual chatty self: “Major, that’s the dumbest idea ever took its hat off and said howdy.”

“It ain’t. What _is_ would be your dumb ass going back home and maybe only two, three people ever finding out about all this, now is that lasting humiliation for your daddy or just a sore afternoon? Stay here, word will spread.”

“And we’ll hang. You might not be much concerned with your neck, major, but _I’m_ concerned with _mine_.”

“This whole area has got the peculiar idea of leaving people the hell alone and to their own devices. Nearest town’s Red Rock, and sure, there’s some law there, but out here in the sticks, a good neighbor’s the one who doesn’t make trouble for you and _maybe_ loans you out his pistol or gives you a side of pork come butcher-time. And there’s a difference between people knowing and people _knowing_. Hell, everybody knows Minnie and Sweet Dave—”

“Who the fuck are Minnie and Sweet Dave?”

“Minnie owns Minnie’s Haberdashery, sort of a last stop before Red Rock, good place for the stage to take on new provisions, stretch everybody’s legs. Sells drinks, candy, food, takes on a couple of lodgers and guests from time to time.”

“I ain’t had any candy since I don’t _know_ when.”

“I don’t give a shit about your sweet tooth, but hang around, like we’re talking about, and I’ll bankroll you buying a whole jar of jellybeans if it will shut you the fuck up. Anyway, Minnie’s black—and you keep a civil tongue in your head on that score or you ain’t got to worry about getting hanged because I’ll kill you myself—and Sweet Dave’s white, and everybody knows they’re shacked up, and nobody gives a damn, because hell, it’s not like they’re married, are they? There aren’t any kids. They don’t sit out on the porch holding hands.”

“A black woman and a white man is one hell of a different thing from a black _man_ and a white man,” Chris Mannix said. He didn’t even sound vile about it, just matter-of-fact, like he thought maybe Warren wouldn’t have realized the difference. “This far north, hell. That’s nothing to folks up here in this snow-ridden ass-crack of America. Me and you? That’s something anywhere.”

“But it happens. How the hell did you get to know what a fancy boy even was without one of them popping up somewhere?”

Mannix opened his mouth and then closed it.

“Starting to get it now? Lots of towns have one or two.”

“Sissies,” Mannix said. “I don’t want anybody taking me for a sissy.”

“I give you your gun back, nobody’s gonna make that mistake, and if they do, you can teach them better. But plenty of folks get a little bit of gossip stirred up without getting themselves lynched and without getting the law called and _without_ getting called sissies.”

“Which I’m not.”

“Thick line between a fancy boy and a sissy,” Warren agreed. “Stone wall. A fancy boy you’d have to be, though, to make it look right. But a fancy boy with a gun.”

Mannix chewed on his lip and folded his arms like he’d just remembered he was supposed to be thinking things over still. Warren figured he was sold on the idea already. “I don’t see what’s in it for you.”

“What’s in it for me is thinking of Erskine Mannix getting letter after letter saying his son’s shacked up with a black Union major, steam starting to spill out of his ears like he’s a kettle coming to a boil. What’s in it for me is at least with you here I got another hand on a pistol on _my_ side of things if it comes to gunplay, which it will. Or did you think a man who built his life around a lost fucking cause wouldn’t travel a couple hundred miles out of his way to kill the _black_ man his son sucked off just to humiliate him? You ain’t think of that, did you? Now, I did, and I figure, hell, it’s worth it just for the laughs. But I’m not looking to die the way you evidently are, so I figure keeping you here, that’s a little bit of advanced warning and a little bit to even the score. That, and the rest of it.”

That tricked out a smile. “Oh, _the rest of it_ , is _that_ what we’re calling it now?”

Warren shrugged. “I’m not too proud to admit it’s a point on the side of you staying. Like you said, you know what to do. If I’m gonna get killed over it, I’d rather get a little more of it first.”

The smile faded, and Mannix looked out the window at the even peaks of white snow. Some of it had drifted during the night, but it was level enough to ride out on, if he did go that way. He said, almost gruffly, “I wasn’t thinking on you getting killed even if I left, I am that _fucking_ stupid,” which surprised Warren just a little. In his considerable experience, white folks didn’t know when they’d been stupid.

“I took it all into account before I ever got your mouth on me,” he said. “But if it troubles your conscience, stick around.”

Mannix went back to chewing on himself like he was his own personal piece of tobacco. “We’d have to work out some kind of deal.”

“I thought deals were inimical to your tender feelings about whoring.”

“Inimical?”

“Like they’re the enemy of.” He’d have to make Mannix read a fucking dictionary from time to time.

“Not a deal in advance working out what I’d do for you or vice versa, just a typical kind of deal. You said I’d have to look like a fancy boy, I want to know what you got in mind.” He shook out his sleeves, brushing blanket fluff off himself. “You gonna buy me things, black major? I want to know why.”

“This ain’t that complicated, white boy. _Why_ is wanting to get at your daddy. We been through this already.”

“Huh-uh. That’s something other than convincing. You could get back to my daddy by staking me to an anthill and painting me with honey.”

“Now there’s an idea. We’re a little short on anthills around here, though.” He did like honey, though, as a matter of fact. That part of the idea wasn’t bad. “I’m not gonna dip into my life-savings for you, you damn fool. If you’re a steady enough hand with a pistol, we can partner up to get some bounties in. That’s more money I’d be pulling in otherwise. You wouldn’t be going into debt on it. The percentage for me in tricking you out properly _is_ rubbing your daddy’s face in it—it makes the whole thing more obvious. Nothing spells out your pretty open mouth like a turquoise coat or two.”

Mannix folded his arms. “I think you _like_ it, major.”

“Turquoise? Come to think of it, can’t be sure that’s your color till I see it on.”

“You like everybody knowing. You’d have me down on my knees for you in front of a crowd if _that_ was something you could get away with. You _want_ me fancy because it gets you hard.” He looked down and raised his eyebrows. “Well, I see you have no retort.”

“Shut up,” Warren said, unbuckling his belt. “You staying or going?”

“That don’t affect whether or not you get undressed?”

“Either it’s sealing the deal or it’s saying _adios_ , I don’t really give a shit.”

“Consider it a deal,” Chris Mannix said.

“Good. Then get yourself over here. At the moment I’m not particular as to what you’re wearing.”

“You damn sure aren’t,” Mannix said.

*

The next few days they stayed in and fucked, with the big difference being that Warren could get away from him sometimes by going outside when his nonsense got to be too much. But he was surprised, he had to admit, by how fast they settled into what folks might take for some kind of pattern. They played cards and bickered. Mannix read dime novels out loud, making them mildly entertaining by dint of that southern-fried voice and Warren occasionally getting to correct him on a word. They exercised the horses.

“You’re too inclined to make friends with ‘em,” Mannix said.

“Oh, unlike you, huh? I guess I must have dreamed up you stroking their noses all the time.”

“That’s just good taking-care. I don’t talk to them any.”

“Well, that surprises me, you having something you don’t talk to. I thought I heard you directing that dumb cracker chatter of yours at the fucking woodpile yesterday.”

And they indulged the rest of it. Probably Chris Mannix mistook Warren as looking down at him sometimes when Warren was really only double- and triple-checking to make sure his johnson hadn’t melted away under all that touch. He hadn’t gotten so well-laid since his cavalry days. What Mannix was fussiest about was getting him off right before bed and one time Warren did really look down at him while he was doing that, tried to figure him out. He didn’t get very far.

Then he brought off Mannix, a thing he was beginning to be fond of in its own right.

“What’s it with you not being able to keep your hands off me,” Warren said to him.

“That’s pot and kettle, major, _considering_.”

He tightened his grip a little around the base of Mannix’s cock and Mannix made some soft yelping sound.

Warren resumed his strokes. “The way you come after me, I’m halfway to convinced you would have come out here to get some of this, daddy or no.”

“You’re crazy.”

“More like curious. I ain’t got a low opinion of myself, but it’s a true damn fact that men twenty years my junior don’t usually get all big-eyed and desperate for me. _You_ the damn exception proves that rule, Chris Mannix. Now explain yourself a little or risk me taking my hand away right as you near the fucking close.”

“Bastard,” Mannix said. He closed his eyes. “Don’t go doing that. I can’t—you just do something to me. Fucks my head up, the way you talk to me.”

“That so?” He moved his hand a little faster. “You desperate for me?”

Mannix looked up a little through those eyelashes of his. He was still holding on to some of his pride, but Warren was working it out of him stroke by stroke, and it didn’t take but thirty seconds for him to give it all up. “All right, yeah, I’m desperate for you, major. Don’t stop, don’t you fucking _stop_ ,” but Warren slowed, just to spite him, just to hear that suppressed howl of frustration caught in his throat. Mannix wasn’t what Warren would call pretty, but sometimes he looked it anyway.

“I’ll say what I do,” Warren said, caressing him real slow, root to tip, brushing his fingers against Mannix’s balls and making Mannix whimper. “We clear on that?”

“Yessir.”

“Yessir like you understand me?”

Mannix’s face contorted, tomato-colored now. He didn’t know what Warren wanted from him, and he didn’t have much brain to think with. Warren pumped him mercilessly.

“Say I’m the one says what I do,” Warren prompted him.

Dumb gratitude lit up Mannix’s face like a sun-flash. “You’re the one says what you do, major.”

“So ask me not to stop.”

“Dammit, I did, didn’t I?”

“Telling ain’t the same as asking. I fought the war on that principle, you’ll remember.”

“Aw, fuck, major, _fuck_. Please don’t stop touching me, major, please, with—with a fucking _cherry_ on top if that’s what you want, oh _yes, yes, yes_ —” and he came with a comical geyser burst that luckily he knew by then he had to clean up himself.

Warren watched him do it and considered the fact that he seemed to drive Chris Mannix mad beyond the telling of it, which was piss-poor flattery but flattery all the same. He waited until Mannix was watching and then he sucked some of Mannix’s come off his fingertips and damned if Mannix didn’t shiver from head to toe like he’d be ready to go again in just another minute.

“Cherry on top gonna be yours anytime soon, you figure?” Warren said, trying to keep his voice light, like it wasn’t any skin off his ass one way or the other, like he hadn’t been wasting any time thinking about it.

Mannix stopped folding up the filthy come-towel they’d been keeping around and his face went blank and almost hard, empty as an old wasp’s nest. “I ain’t cherry,” he said. “If that’s why you’ve been thinking I don’t want you doing that. I’ve done it before. So that’s popped and gone.”

Warren turned that over a little. “Somebody make you?” It’d explain a few things, and it wasn’t like it was so unusual.

“No, nobody made me, damn you, and it’s none of your _goddamn_ business anyhow, is it? I don’t see any call for a man getting off three, four times a day to go around tugging my sleeve about the one piece of me he’s not welcome to.” He tossed the rag aside and looked like he wished he had something to hit. Warren had been meaning to give him back his pistol, but he sure as hell wasn’t going to make the mistake of doing it right then.

He chose a measured response instead. “If you’re done pitching a fit, put your coat on. We need supplies, and no rumor’s gonna spread any kind of distance without us leaving here once in a while.”

“Minnie’s?”

“Closest place to kill two birds.”

Mannix found his coat, mood having blown past him as quick as it had come on. “Whoo-ee, major, it’ll be good to stretch our legs a little. I ain’t walked further than the barn since I _got_ here. And I am curious, I’ll admit, to see what kind of woman would name a place a haberdashery and not sell a single damned hat. Is it a black thing?”

“No, just a Minnie thing, and that rule we have about you and a particular word?”

“I know, I know. You’ll kill me. Boom, gone, no more pretty-mouthed Southern cracker. Are you ready yet?”

“Slow your roll a little, white boy. Rule goes double for Minnie and any people work for her.”

“Oh, you gonna kill me _twice_ , black major? That I would like to see.”

“No, but I’ll kill you twice as slow.”

That wiped the smile off the dumb son-of-a-bitch’s face, sure enough, and Warren grinned himself to see it go. He gave Mannix a hard once-over; told him to unbutton that shirt of his a little once they got inside again out of the cold, show off the hickey Warren had given him on his throat. They hadn’t yet gone lip-to-lip, but Warren had taken considerable pleasure in marking him up a little whenever he got the chance, so Mannix was spotted all over with bruises and bites the color of peach-pits. It wasn’t reciprocal—Warren hadn’t stopped him, but it just didn’t seem to occur to him to take the same license. Mannix’s kisses vanished off Warren’s skin the second the air touched them.

“And here,” Warren concluded, after he’d gotten Mannix fresh-faced and edible-looking again, slapped a little washing-water on his cheeks. “Wear this scarf. I can’t say as they’ll recognize it as mine and not yours, but the blue might be a giveaway.”

Mannix’s face puckered up at it. “I have to?”

“I won’t hang you with it if you don’t, but if you’re looking to make an impression, fancy-wise, it’s the best we’ve got for right now.”

Mannix went on and knotted it around his neck, where it looked halfway decent, but he seemed like he’d rather be handling fresh dogshit than Union blue. “When spring comes and the roads get better, promise you’ll buy me something pretty.”

He figured Mannix for forgetting whether he was pretending to be a fancy boy or was being one in truth and he couldn’t figure for himself whether he minded that or not. Though damn him for a fool if he’d shell out much money buying him anything—now that the weather was clearing, they could both hunt bounties, and if Mannix wanted pretty, he could buy some hisownself. Warren wouldn’t stop him, but he wouldn’t break his back trying to help him, either. Not much, anyway.

“For right now all you’re getting is continued freeloading and you’ll be grateful to have it, too.” He threw Mannix his gun-belt, reasoning enough time had passed, Mannix as mercurial as he was, for it to be safe. “And that back. Don’t make me regret it.”

“No, sir, major.” He buckled it on and it didn’t look bad, hanging off those bony hips of his, and neither did the grin he flashed in response, a smile that had no history behind it. “We ready to ride?”

They were, though he wasn’t sure where Mannix had gotten that “we” shit.

They got to Minnie’s a little after noon, and Warren was hoping for some of Minnie’s stew and maybe to play a game or two of chess with Sweet Dave if Mannix could be trusted not to stir shit up in that amount of time. Warren pulled up to a trot and motioned Mannix up to one as they got close and told him just about that. “Red Rock’s a couple hours’ ride on still, which means you show your ass in here and you’re stuck in four walls any time I don’t want to spend all fucking day on the road, you got that?”

“You act like you think I can’t comport myself at all.”

“I ain’t never seen you comport yourself in a way that didn’t have you down on your knees with your mouth open.”

“Well, I can be polite, dammit, major.”

“Guess I’m about to find out.”

In they went to the stables, where Charley registered a little flicker of surprise that Major Marquis Warren was riding in with a white fellow, but didn’t ask after it. Probably nobody would get that direct about it in white boy’s hearing, white folks being notoriously thin-skinned about inquiries. If it came to it, he’d send Mannix off in a corner to pick out a present for himself, and he’d clear things up then, as much as he could. He’d stumbled into lunacy, of course, which wouldn’t be readily explicable to calmer minds.

Minnie called out to him once he was inside. “Well, Major Marquis, we were just after wondering whether or not you’d lived through that blowdown.”

“Take more than that to knock me off my feet.” He took off his hat and nudged Mannix to do the same. “Place seems deserted today.”

“You’re about the only person mistakes this for clear weather. Who’s your friend? Come over here and let me get a good look at the both of you.”

Translation: come over here and let me confirm that son-of-a-bitch is as white as I think he is, and in which case, what’s he doing with _you_? Minnie had always been able to abide white folks on a case-by-case basis and it was Warren’s contention he could too, as long as those white folks were Sweet Dave and Six-Horse Judy. The rest of the race he could take or leave, and mostly leave—even the halfway decent ones weren’t worth the trouble. And Mannix was a damn sight further from decent than half.

When Minnie beckoned, people came, so they went.

Mannix tipped her a little salute and sketched a bow, which Minnie seemed amused by, and which Warren was irritated by.

“Ma’am. Glad to make your acquaintance. I’m Chris.”

Type of clientele Minnie got sometimes, not getting a surname from him didn’t raise her eyebrows any.

“Well, Chris, a pleasure.” She poked Warren’s arm. “He staying with you?”

“Time being, yeah.”

“You must be something. Didn’t know the major was in the habit of taking on houseguests.”

“I believe I’ll be helping him go after bounties now that the roads are passable.”

“Earning your keep, then.”

Mannix’s face contorted slightly and Warren _did_ want to laugh at that. “Yes, ma’am. That surely is the _plan_.”

Warren didn’t want to have to sit through any more of this shit where Chris Mannix tried to be charming and halfway succeeded. “Can you amuse yourself around here for an hour or so I can get in some conversation with civilized folks, maybe play a game of chess?”

“I surely can,” Mannix said, and did that asshole-version of a bow again and scuttled off like a crab, probably to go pawn his dick and balls for penny candy, which would be about all they’d be worth.

“You’re a little long in the tooth to be taking on partners all of a sudden,” Minnie said, in an entirely different tone of voice. As much as she said she didn’t mind white folks, she still changed up a little around them, or around all of them except Dave. When you didn’t have tricks the way Warren had, manners had to do. “If there’s a story behind him showing up and the two of you apparently being cozy enough to sit out a storm together, first drink’s on the house if you want to tell it.”

“Any kind of folks can sit out a storm together, that doesn’t mean a damned thing. Despite what you seem to think, I’m not in the habit of killing every son-of-a-bitch I meet, even if it would improve on them a little.”

“You’re stalling, Major Marquis.”

“It’s not a crime to want a bite to eat and a drink and maybe a game before I go on telling tales. My tab still good here?”

“Tab’s always good for Union men. At least that’s what I tell you all to get business in.”

“He’ll be on my tab, then.”

“With that accent, I’d figured on that.”

“Questions, questions, questions.” He stripped off his gloves. “Bowl of stew for me and one for him.”

“You want me to run a tally for him on candy, too? ‘Cause he’s looking at it awfully hard.”

“He’s on his own for that nonsense, but I’ll take a bill of resupply, same as last time, and—you got any fabric in you’re willing to do tailoring on?”

“Too hard on my eyes, but Gemma will do it if you work out a fee with her. The both of you need outfitting?”

He nodded. “Nothing too tasteful for him, either. Do it in blue—turquoise blue, if you’ve got any of that.”

She blew out a breath between her teeth. “Well, well, well, Major _Marquis_.” She shot another look at Mannix, who was chatting up Gemma, his forearms laid across her candy counter. By the smile on her face, shy but not scared, he was doing a decent job of it. “He’s not half bad-looking, neither. You expected me to be surprised? You run an in-between kind of place, you meet a lot in-between kind of people. Judy’s got a sweetheart’s another girl. Kind of cute you have trouble taking your eyes off him.”

“I have trouble taking my eyes off him ‘cause I don’t know what he’s going to say and Gemma’s a sweet girl.”

“Gemma’s like me, she’s heard a lot worse than men liking to rub their uglies together.”

“That ain’t what I’m afraid he’s going to mention. You know who he is?”

“Sure, Chris with no family, evidently, which now isn’t such a surprise, since I can tell what he’s been doing and so could his folks.”

“That’s true as far as it goes.” He whistled sharply and Mannix came off the counter quick as a shot and said something to Gemma, who giggled, before he came over.

“Dish up some stew for yourself. Can you watch a chess game without adding to it any with conversation?”

“Not without going bored out of my mind.”

“Dime novel help?”

Mannix accepted the bribe and Minnie looked on with that little grin, like she wanted to pinch everybody’s cheeks for being so cute, and Warren thought about all the blood that must’ve been on Mannix’s hands, blood and ash, and said, “His family name’s Mannix. That’s why he didn’t give it to you. He knows where it’s been.”

Minnie’s face went a little stiff, like she had to duck out of her own skin for a while, close up shop. “Mannix’s Marauders?”

“Same ones. Got to think how much it’d tweak his daddy’s nose to know where his boy is right now, and who he’s with.”

“I suppose,” Minnie said, her voice tighter than a closed fist, and she went off almost sideways, scurrying like a crab across the floor to the stewpot.

Warren leaned a little closer to Mannix. “If she has any fire in her, and she does, she’s gonna spit in that, and I’ll expect you to eat every bite of it and lick the bowl if I ask you to.”

Mannix wasn’t in the mood to _yessir_ him, though. He had his hand on the butt of his pistol, grip so tight it seemed sensible for Warren to reach for his own, just in case. He squeezed close to Mannix and grabbed him by the balls, nice and tight, whispered that if their places were reversed, he’d sure be real careful what he did just then. Mannix scowled at him something furious and took his hand off his gun; Warren relaxed his hold and sent him off. Minnie had been whispering to Gemma while she dished up the stew and he wasn’t going to find any smiles over there. He ended up eating in the corner, looking for all the world to see like there was a raincloud over him.

Warren grinned at it and went ahead and played those games of chess with Sweet Dave, who didn’t know what was going on and didn’t care, and won one and lost the other. Gemma measured him and the sulking white boy and didn’t do anything more than smile, all tight-lipped, and circle around them as Mannix tried to resume that little flirty courtesy he’d had before. It tickled Warren so much he bought Mannix a quarter’s worth of candy after all.

They rode out again about three. Warren figured: rumors spread, white nonsense thwarted, arrangements made to pick up the clothes in a week or so, fresh supplies tied up on the horses, taste of Minnie’s cooking, a little recreation, Mannix’s sweet tooth satisfied. Not a bad afternoon.

Mannix thought otherwise and was seething over it—came off his horse once they were back at the cabin like he was a whirling dervish. Whirling dumbass. He seemed to think he didn’t have to put his horse away on account of being so fucking upset, which actually amused Warren so much he _did_ put the horse away for him, just this once, and came inside the house to find Mannix angrily slamming supplies into where he seemed to reckon they’d go.

“You break any of that and I’m not going to be too happy about it.”

The next slam was even more pointed. “Why’d you have to go and do that?”

“Go and do what?” He knew, but he wanted Mannix to say it.

Mannix wheeled around to face him. “Tell her who my family was!”

“Only way this shit works is if people know who your family is,” Warren said, reasonably enough, keeping his eye on Mannix’s gun. His hands weren’t anywhere near it, at least. “You think you’re so distinctive word’s gonna spread as far as we need it to without it?”

“You didn’t have to do it like _that_.”

Warren chuckled. “What’s the matter, Chris Mannix, that hurt your feelings? You _sad_ now, that the nice black folks got their skin crawling around you, you can’t _charm_ them anymore?”

“I was just doing what you asked, damn you, major—”

“Nah, nah, you went the extra mile for it. I said don’t make an ass of yourself, don’t say anything I’ll have to shoot you over. You _liked_ buttering them up. Liked being around somebody liked _you_ for a change—shit but that must have been a while, since anyone looked at you like you were fit to be around decent folks. But you know what, Mannix? You don’t deserve to get looked at that way, not by them. If you were gonna end up wanting black folks to like you, you should have lived better.”

“Shut the fuck up,” Mannix said, breathing heavy and hard. “You don’t deserve _shit_. All those boys you burned—”

“Those boys like you? I did the world a fucking favor.”

“Union boys too?”

“Sure,” he said, and there was a relief to saying it, to not having to pretend. “All of them. The difference between you and me is you hate someone, you want them under your boot, so you can squash them if they rise up, play with and pet them if you’re feeling friendly. Kick them if you’re feeling down. Me, I’m not so complex. I just want all you motherfuckers dead and in the ground.”

He felt like something immense had come off his shoulders; it almost made him happy.

Mannix didn’t look happy at all. He looked like he was trying to remember something so old he’d been born with it printed on the inside of his skin.

Then he dropped to his knees, hitting the floor so hard he must’ve banged himself up from it, would be blue with bruises, and opened his mouth, and the sight hit Warren like a hammer. Like lightning. Warren went over to him and was hard before he even got himself out of his pants; thrust into Mannix’s mouth and _fucked_ him like that, not letting Mannix suck, not letting him do anything. Barely keeping any kind of track on whether or not the man could breathe. He fucked his throat until he came and Mannix took it and afterwards, come and spit smeared across his puffed-up lips, pupils blown out big and dark like he’d taken laudanum, Mannix said, “You like me under your boot, too, major. Don’t you fucking forget that.”

*

In the morning there wasn’t much else for them to do or talk about except a couple warrant papers Warren had stashed away before the storm that were probably still good. He relayed the pertinent details: it’s hard living, keep quiet, ask questions only when you have to, don’t trust anybody, look at the pictures, never bring them in alive. He allowed as how he could see that having a white man along might be useful and if Mannix was any kind of significant help, Warren would split the bounties with him fifty-fifty, and if he wasn’t, he’d still get twenty percent just for tagging along. Mannix nodded a lot. His lips weren’t totally sealed—he unbent to ask a couple questions about it all—but he was in one of those still moods again. He packed his bag and asked Warren if he could throw in a couple of the dime novels. Warren said sure.

Mannix’s lips still looked like he’d walked face-first into a beehive.

They saddled up. Mannix patted the lintel of the stable like it was a friend’s shoulder and Warren declined to make fun of him for it because he had a spot of momentary sentimentality himself.

They’d left around dawn, which meant that a day’s hard riding brought them to Red Rock. Mannix pointed to a hotel.

“Not that one,” Warren said.

Turning half-blue from the cold had given Mannix a little bit of temper back. “Why the hell not?”

“Well, you could, if you had the money, but you don’t. And I’m not putting it up for you to stay there all by yourself.”

Mannix absorbed that, painfully slowly, like Warren was teaching him to read instead of just telling him the facts of life, like Mannix had never heard tell in his whole life of a place that wouldn’t accommodate black folks. Like he hadn’t burned down a place or two that was more on the amenable side.

He pulled up on his horse and pointed it away from the hotel’s livery. “Yeah, all right. So where are we going?”

“Shithole on the outskirts. Cheer up, fancy boy. I _will_ give you five dollars to drink at the lily white place and come back and tell me if the chatter’s saying anything about our man.”

“Hap Winton, triple-murderer.”

“Yeah, that son-of-a-bitch.”

“It bother you?” Mannix said, like there was nothing weird about having some kind of heart-to-heart conversation in the middle of the thoroughfare, their horses snuffling at each other like kissy-kissy friends. “Killing ‘em for money when it could just as easily be _your_ name on somebody’s warrant sheet?”

“Hell no, and it _is_ my name on somebody’s warrant sheet, near enough, or did you forget?”

Mannix pursed his lips out like he really had forgotten that he was shacked up with Major Marquis Warren of Confederate bounty fame. Warren didn’t know whether to laugh or cry.

“Price could be on my head too, now,” Mannix offered, like that was going to touch Warren to the heart and prove that they were all the same underneath.

He pulled his horse up a little closer and reached out and tapped Mannix open-handed across the cheek, not quite hard enough to be a slap but not soft enough to be anything else, and Mannix flinched like Warren had fired a pistol at him. Good. Warren liked him kind of jumpy.

They checked in at the hotel and went upstairs and killed what bugs they could. Mannix eyed the one bed. Proprietor couldn’t have known he was opening up a can of worms for them on that front. He’d mistaken them for near-strangers, bristling traveling companions, partners—any of which could’ve shared a bed more neatly than whatever they actually were. Warren considered chalking a line down the center but then figured fuck it, as much sweat as they’d gotten on each other, the bed was probably a moot point.

“You start having one of those dreams where you’re thrashing around, I’ll kick you up.”

Mannix looked over, startled all to hell and gone. “I don’t do that.”

“Okay. Guess I been hallucinating it all. You never had a restless night in your life.”

“Whatever, major.” He held out his hand. “You want me talking up white people or not?”

Warren gave him five dollars. “Drink slow, and listen more than you talk, which I know isn’t gonna be easy, your mouth being the way it is.”

“My mouth being the way it is, major, is the only reason you like me. Otherwise you’d want me dead and in the ground, isn’t that right?”

“You know it is,” Warren said, almost affably.

They went out and drank at their separate places. All night long, Warren felt the absence of him, which was what happened when you let yourself get used to getting your ashes hauled regular and then had to go a long-ass day without. He figured Mannix for probably getting his ass kicked up around his ears for talking a blue streak to the wrong person. The boy couldn’t govern himself. Warren could, and did, and so he drank his own five dollars down nice and slow and listened to the bar talk, teased out a couple people might know something about old Hap Winton, didn’t arouse too much suspicion. Nobody asked him what he’d done to live his life so he was hunting after one white man and slipping it to another, because they didn’t have the ammunition for it, but Warren drank a little more and wondered about it himself. Looked at it one kind of way, he decided, he was a hell of a lucky man, aside from being so plagued with white folks, because if they were gonna be around all the time, he might as well either be killing them or fucking them, instead of the other way around.

He got back to the hotel around ten and Mannix was already there, hyped up like a boxer ‘cause he’d gotten about a tenth of what Warren had and thought he was hot shit for it. He twirled around the room, light-footed, throwing punches at the air.

“So people are saying Winton’s probably shacked up on the other side of the mountain with this fellow _might_ be a cousin, _might_ be a cousin’s half-brother, _might_ be a doctor dealing laudanum half-price, and I’m thinking all right, if this man’s got a cousin, why ain’t anybody looked there yet?” He spun around, his coat flaring up, and Warren had to concede that this was one of the times the boy looked pretty. Mannix was grinning smugger than a cat licking cream off a saucer. He pointed at Warren. “That’s what you’re wondering, major.”

It wasn’t, but he’d bite anyway. “So why’s nobody looked there yet?”

Mannix came up off his toes to deliver a hard uppercut to nothing at all. “They _did_ , major, they motherfucking _did_ , but despite it all, rumors persist, and you want to know why?”

There was only so long he’d agree to be spoon-fed information he already had. “Because the cousin’s got an abandoned tin mine on the edge of his property, Winton was probably hiding in there.”

Mannix’s face wilted like a flower under heavy rain. “Aww, you knew?”

“I knew. You didn’t do bad for a first-timer, though.”

“Your approval means the _world_ to me, major, sir,” Mannix said, rolling his eyes. He hooked his suspenders off his shoulders. “You ready for bed and you want your johnson tended to first or not?”

“You packed a couple different questions into that,” Warren said, but he took his own coat off and folded it over the chair. “Yeah, I’m ready for bed, and as much as it pains me to admit it, I’m tired enough and sore enough that all I want’s sleep.”

“I call that good news and then some, ‘cause I think I’d drop off and choke on you if I tried it.” Mannix kept peeling down his clothes until he was in nothing but a set of white longjohns gone yellow at the snaps and even though Warren had seen him in such every night since he’d first come, there was something different about them now that they were fixing to be laid across the bed from him with the white boy himself inside. The thought didn’t seem to bother Mannix any, because he tucked himself in with alacrity, snuggled down into the pillow, and sighed a sigh that seemed to come from his bones. Warren almost got a kick out of him.

“Don’t pretend like that heap of buffalo furs you’ve got back at the house is so damn uncomfortable this louse-ridden thing’s a treat.”

“It’s all a state of mind, major. A man likes to be in a proper bed.”

Warren swung in beside him. It was narrow enough that he could feel the warmth of another body. Long time since the last time he’d felt that. It’d been, what, eight months since his path had crossed with Jerome’s?

He closed his eyes. “We get back home, you can sleep in the bed, if only because I now suspect you’ll take on an everlasting whine I don’t let you.”

“Obliged,” Chris Mannix said, friendly enough, and then he fell abruptly into silence that it took Warren a minute or two to realize wasn’t sleep, but just Mannix in another funny quiet mood. But that subsided into sleep eventually, or Warren subsided first, because the next thing he knew, it was morning, the sun was glaring into his eyes as big and yellow as an egg-yolk, and Mannix was glued to the back of him and drooling on his shoulder. It felt strange to lie there with another man pressed up against him, doing nothing but sleeping. If Mannix had had the dreams, they hadn’t been too loud; Warren didn’t remember his own. So not a bad night.

He elbowed Mannix off him and the man shifted sleepily, burrowing down further into the mattress. There was a bright pink seam on his cheek from the pillow.

Warren got up and dressed, shivering in the cold, and then woke up Mannix, who blinked a lot, confused about where they were, and then patted the bed before he left it like it was a dog. He splashed some water on his face and it seemed to clear him. Warren didn’t mention either the girlish clinging or the drool, for reasons even he wasn’t sure of, but said that they’d ride out to the cousin’s place, stealthy and quiet, and see what there was to see.

“You gonna be up for shooting a man in the back?”

Mannix shrugged. “Always have been before.”

“That’s an attitude I’d like better if I didn’t know where it came from.”

“Well, I can’t help that any,” Mannix said, but not much like he would if he could.

They bought clumpy oatmeal downstairs and ate it with their hands and about the only thing he’d say in Mannix’s favor was that he wasn’t squeamish about eating bad food. All that time on the road killing black folks and burning their towns must have inured his tongue, burnt it up with Confederate camp-side cooking and men cussing over their stewpots. Probably it was only Mannix’s inclination towards prick that gave him any skill at it—a feminine touch. Warren didn’t have it, but then again, Warren inclined towards being on top, which he figured was different. Though it would be hard to mistake Mannix for womanly—there was that.

Trying hard to hate the man this morning didn’t seem to be working, so Warren settled for getting them both on horseback and headed out of town.

“It’s easy to overstay a welcome,” Warren said, letting their horses trot close enough together for conversation. “They don’t know you yet, but they know you’re with me, or word’ll spread about it quick enough. You drop your name at the hotel bar?”

“Surely did.”

“Then that serves our long-term purposes. But short-term, as far as shooting Hap Winton an upper asshole right between his shoulder-blades and collecting a healthy three thousand for him, well, entirely possible his cousin’s got friends in there. They all know by now what I do for a living. Things get hot sometimes. You’re good with a gun?”

“You’re the only one I ever let take it away from me,” Chris Mannix said, flashing him a smile, like Warren was in any kind of mood to get charmed.

“Can you hit what you point it at is what I’m asking.”

“In my _sleep_ , major, is what I’m saying.”

“You turn out to be gloating much about that and I’ll make you pay for it.”

He kicked his heels into the horse and led them on, not giving Mannix a chance to crack wise with him about what he planned to do, and wanting to stew on it a little anyhow. Thinking of ways to make Mannix suffer kept him warm on his way out to the mine. Too long now since Warren had seen him lick his own spunk off his fingers: could keep him bare-assed in the wooden chair, squirming and sweating against it, pumping into his hand, sucking on his fingers, kept hot, buzzing like a beehive in his own skin, going again and again, until his skin was pink and red, until he was sore, until he was hoarse, until he was pleading with Warren to let him stop. That, yeah. Slip a “sir” in there in that cornpone voice of his and that would do just fine.

“Dammit, major,” Mannix said, as they dismounted. He was flushed up well enough that he almost could have stepped out of Warren’s imagination. “There wasn’t no call for that.”

“That a distraction for you, white boy?”

Mannix screwed up his mouth and tried to spit into the snow, but he was dry enough that he couldn’t come up with anything, which was answer enough. He blew a raspberry instead. “Like it wasn’t for you, you black bastard?”

“It was,” he said equitably. “I’m never troubled by myself that way, though.”

“I could probably trouble you some.”

“I’d believe it, considering you’ve been nothing but trouble so far. Gun in hand, Mannix. You know the face well enough? Stature, build, too? Don’t get attached to a beard or a haircut.”

“I got it,” Mannix said, tapping his temple with his gun hand like a fucking idiot.

Warren took a pass on mentioning it. “Creep,” he said. “Soft-footed. You get me?”

“I get you.”

The hell of it was, he genuinely seemed to. He moved over the landscape like a shadow—light on the ground even on the snow, never snapping a twig beneath his boots, mouth finally stopped, pink gone from his cheeks, lithe and mean and Warren’s. Warren’s own personal white man, who’d learned walking quiet and shooting straight by raiding former slaves. Beauty out of blood. All at once he couldn’t think of Winton at all. What he wanted to do was either fuck Chris Mannix right out there in the snow or kill him or both. He drew a bead on the back of Mannix’s skull. Dumbass kept moving in front of him like there was no problem at all. But something stopped him from pulling the trigger—not sentiment. But something.

Mannix threw a wartime hand-signal at him must’ve been used by both sides. Warren thought, _Do that again and I break your fucking fingers_ , but was relieved to be back to being amused by the odds that he’d kill this boy before they were done.

He flanked, as requested, and they found Hap Winton breaking ice to draw water from the stream. Warren verified him—height, yeah, weight, a little thinner but not much, redheaded, freckled, crooked-toothed, drunk—and was about to cut his spine in two with a bullet when Winton must’ve felt the warmth of them through the air, ‘cause he spun around something quick.

Mannix fired—good—but not before Winton fired too, with the gun he’d been using the butt of to break the ice. It wasn’t anything more than a clip across the arm, but Mannix spun down howling like a fool anyhow.

Warren put another bullet in Winton just to be on the safe side and then turned around. Mannix was looking at the world accusatorily, blood spilling out from around his hand, and yowling like a cat that’d had its tail stepped on. Warren eyed the wound and wasn’t impressed. He holstered. “You about done making that noise?”

“I figure I _ain’t_ ,” Mannix said, hissing out between his teeth. “I got him, didn’t I?”

“You hit, probably killed him. I was just making sure. Didn’t want to put up with the racket if he’d shot you a second time.”

“It hurts bad, major.”

“It ain’t even stuck in you, that’s a pure flesh wound. Pour some whiskey on it when we get back to town.” He patted Mannix’s cheek. “And cheer up, white boy, fifteen hundred will buy a lot of whiskey. You’ll have plenty left to drink after you disinfect.”

“I haven’t been shot before,” Mannix said, looking at the wound then with considerable interest, poking apart his coat and shirt to eyeball it better.

“Now _that_ surprises me.”

“Well, it shouldn’t, should it? Even your cracker-hating ass didn’t put a bullet in me, right?”

Which Warren had to concede.

Between the two of them, even with Mannix’s whimpering, they got Winton dragged up over the back of Mannix’s horse. Warren considered it all and sighed. “Can you ride double?”

Mannix huffed an exasperated breath. “I guess I’m gonna have to, right? How’d you used to do it with only one horse?”

“Sled, because usually I could stash the asshole away in the snow like a side of meat and come back for him. I don’t like to ride out with a body-dragging sled swinging behind me like a horse’s tail on account of how it tends to broadcast my intentions, plus making things noisier. But with your arm, I figure you’re gonna want to get things here wrapped up as soon as possible, not wait for me to dig a temporary grave.”

“I’d sure as hell prefer it, but I’d also prefer not riding bitch back into town.” He squinted at his arm again. “You’re sure this isn’t much of anything?”

“I don’t recommend you standing in front of bullets getting peppered for sport, but no, you’re not gonna bleed out from it and you’re not gonna lose your arm.”

“Take him in, then,” Mannix said, all magnanimous, like he was doing Warren the biggest favor imaginable, “since we already slung him up there, and I’ll wait down in the mine.”

“And if the cousin comes back and tries to shoot you for shooting Winton?”

“I did not think of that.”

“Yeah, I guessed.”

“Can’t I double up on the corpse? It looks a shade more natural.”

“The amount of time I spend talking to you about the dumbest shit in the world, when I think I’ll never get it back and I’ll die all the sooner, makes me want to sit down and cry. Fine. Move him over your saddle-horn and ride in with him, but when we dismount, _I_ bring him in, not you. They know me, but if they see you drag his dead ass in, they won’t split the profit.”

“That’s just splitting money out of doors instead of in.”

“That’s just me counting on your honesty, which I’m not in the mood to do.” At least Mannix didn’t argue the point that if they came in together, the white man would get the money just for stepping forward first and having his hand on the bounty’s skull. At least he wasn’t _that_ stupid. “You need help up on the horse?”

“Wouldn’t say no,” Mannix said.

They rode back into Red Rock together, the body bouncing on the horn of Mannix’s saddle like a sack of flour, Mannix looking whiter and more increasingly like a sack of flour his own self, dealt with the sheriff, and took their split, fifteen hundred each. Warren caved on that fifty-fifty on account of Mannix firing first, though so far he figured he could’ve done it all just as well on his lonesome. But he took a couple dollars from the white boy’s stash and bought cheap liquor to pour over the rip in him and better liquor to drink and then he got out a needle and thread and watched Mannix blanch still further.

“I was just about to give you some credit for being tough,” Warren said, a little tickled by it. “You volunteering to be left bleeding back at the mine and all.”

“Bleeding, hell, bleeding’s better than getting stitched up.”

“Drink some more and see how you feel then.”

“There’s not enough drink in the world to numb my whole arm, major, and you know it. I bet you’re getting a kick out of it.”

“Modest one. Arm up, then, if you’re not gonna booze any longer.”

“Well, I didn’t say I wasn’t, did I?” He kicked the bottle back again and took two long slugs from it, Adam’s apple pretty as it moved up and down, sweat and spilled whiskey shiny in the hollow of his throat. He grimaced and wiped his mouth. “All right, do me up.”

Warren didn’t insist on a “please,” given the circumstances. He’d never been partial to getting knit, either. He did it fast and no nonsense and didn’t pay Mannix’s squirming any heed but kept his skin pinched and sewed him up good.

“Damn,” Mannix said, drinking deep again and then tilting the bottle up towards Warren almost in a salute. He was well and truly plastered. “That’s some fine needlework, major.”

“Obliged.”

“Surprised you ain’t threatened to use those skills to stitch my mouth shut.”

“From time to time it’s occurred to me, but your mouth has its better moments.”

“Yeah,” Chris Mannix said, and leaned over and kissed him, tasting like whiskey and blood and money. Warren could have shoved him off but didn’t. He figured Mannix would realize within a minute or two what he was doing and stop, and sure enough Mannix did, but he didn’t look like he’d realized a damned thing, just gave Warren some goofy grin, passed the bottle back his way, said, “Night, major,” and took to bed.

*

Going home: they set up some kind of pattern for themselves.

Mannix eyed the bed pretty hard the first night, like Warren would rescind and kick him out of it, but after that he bounded into not long after sundown with a look on his face like a pup throwing himself into a snowdrift. Warren got used to waking up with Mannix shelved against him like a book. He didn’t snore much; that was something. From time to time, he’d still have the nightmares that set him thrashing around, and Warren would shove him over to the other side of the bed—push him out, even—or else run his hand down Mannix’s back until Mannix stilled, which was quieter, generally, since it meant he actually shut up instead of just pitching a fit a foot or so away, or bitching about being dumped on the floor.

They fucked, and they fucked often. Warren tried out that chair idea, Mannix resorting over and over again to his own hand when told to do so, and liked it fine. Better than fine, maybe.

Mannix read dime novels until he got hoarse.

Warren started writing his own, just for kicks and something else to do in the evenings, and made a funny kind of quick progress on it, it was that fucking easy writing about white men, but then he burned it and started over and wrote something more along the lines of an autobiography, with key parts left out. Then he realized he’d have to account for the Lincoln correspondence, so he burned that draft too. Mannix watched all this with interest and irritation at not being told what the story was. He sucked him off not ten minutes after that second set of papers went into the fireplace, like if he did it well enough, Warren would cave and tell him. Not fucking likely.

Gemma finished up the coat, and Mannix dragged his feet about going back to Minnie’s and getting it, even with Warren with him, and then finally he did.

“That ain’t turquoise,” Warren said.

“It’s jewel-blue,” Gemma said. She kept a good distance from Mannix now that she’d gotten it on him. “Gaud enough for your money, I’d say.”

“It looks nice,” Mannix said. He gave her a twenty, thinking he could buy black folk in one sense as well as he used to in another. She wasn’t won over, but she took it anyway: smart girl. “Thank you for your pains.”

“Wasn’t no trouble, sir.”

“I’m the one you ought to be thanking,” Warren said after Gemma skedaddled. “I paid for it.”

“You paid for it to look at me in it, which you’re fucking doing, and if you reckon that ain’t worth your coin, I’ll pay you back and then some, ‘cause I look _fine_ in this.” He stroked the lapels approvingly and shot Warren what he probably figured for a come-hither kind of look, like Warren was gonna be so overcome he’d stroke him right through those tight trousers of his. “And I’m thinking it’ll do the job we need it to do.”

“Proclaim you to the whole world as ready for an ass-fucking?”

“Major, that ain’t nice. Don’t drag it through the mud.”

“It’s you I’m dragging through the mud, you coat-besotted white boy.” He followed Mannix’s eyeline over to the extra chair at Sweet Dave’s chess table. “That your subtle way of asking if I’m gonna stay a while and play?”

Shit-eating grin number two, the kinda genuinely nervous one, and a nod.

“I am, but you don’t have to. You’re not so stupid you don’t know the way back to the house.”

“Candy?”

“You’re taking this whole sugar daddy thing too damn literally. Those eyes won’t work on me, either. Walk yourself over to the jars and pick out some yourself or go without, it’s not my job to make you feel better about people not liking you.” But then he reconsidered: wrote it down as a favor for Gemma, sparing her from dealing with him, and not a favor for Mannix. “A dollar or two of it, you don’t get to leave me with a whole list of demands, and I’ll be home when I’m home.”

Mannix grinned. “Yes, _sir_.”

Minnie resurfaced after he’d gone, looking a little disapproving, wiping her hands on a dishtowel like even having Mannix around had dirtied the place up, which it might have done. “You want to explain to me why you still got that boy wrapped around your hips tighter than a holster, Major Marquis?”

“The boy has an interest in riling his daddy.”

“My guess is he’s picked the right way to go about it.”

“And I have an interest in the same.”

“You’re hoping enough people see you and him together, him in that coat in particular, word’s gonna get back?”

He nodded. “Not much of a plan, but it’ll pass for one until something better comes along.”

“I don’t expect him to care about it, but do _you_ realize how likely this is to get a bullet in you?”

“When his daddy and all his men ride up to defend white boy’s honor? I figure that for getting a bullet in _him_ , too—fact is, I’m not sure how it didn’t already. As far as the rest of it goes, I enjoy killing them so much it’s handy to give them a reason to march over and spare me the ride, and hell, Minnie, they want a bullet in me anyways. I still turn up their sons one or two a year come to kill me for what’s left of the bounty. That’s what I thought _he_ was doing here.”

She raised her eyebrows. “And you didn’t end him quick?”

“He made a compelling case.”

“Can’t think what _that_ would have involved,” she said dryly. Then she frowned. “Is he—like his daddy?”

It was a bigger question than he’d have liked it to be, and the trouble was he respected Minnie enough to try to answer it honestly. She was a woman too much at ease with liking folks: she wanted him to plaster over all the rot in Mannix so she could have him back to how she’d seen him before Warren had told her that name of his. A nice, cutie-pie white boy, Southern but polite, safe in the way of fancy boys, some prick-comfort to a man she’d known a while. Mannix wasn’t that, or at any rate wasn’t all of that, and there was too much blood on his hands for him to ever be it, however much he cuddled up to Warren, nights.

“He’s done his share. I don’t chase after the details of it, figure I know them well enough. But I don’t think he’ll get up to that kind of evil here, not with another place for his hate to rest while he’s waiting for his daddy to come up the mountain and try to kill him.”

“Seems like he half likes you.”

“I don’t waste my time trying to figure out what he likes or doesn’t.”

Eyebrows up again. “And here I saw you got talked into buying him candy.”

“That was for Gemma’s sake, not his.”

“Mm,” Minnie said, unconvinced even though it was the fucking truth. “You don’t think he’s got partiality for you? Aside from whether or not you give a damn.”

“Maybe. I’m the only person he talks to in any kind of routine way, definitely the only person he goes to bed with. After a while you got to consider he doesn’t have any real choice in it.”

“Oh, ‘cause you’re so damn likable anyone stuck in a house with you all winter long and jumping your bones besides would look at you that way? I’m not seeing that.”

“However he looks,” Warren said, “I wouldn’t take it as any kind of reason to trust him. That aside, like I said, he ain’t safe, but he’s safe to have around, at least for right now. And he gets a little abashed at being disapproved of, which is helpful.”

Minnie nodded and swiped her hands once or twice against her apron like she was getting rid of the subject. “We’ve got some more books in, if you want to take a look.”

“Anything of substance?”

“Nothing that’ll please tastes as snobbish as yours, no, but knowing you, you’ll end up buying them anyway. I put in for other things, but this shit’s always what arrives, month after month. The dealers can’t sell to me what doesn’t get sent to them.”

Three new dime novels. Warren sighed and paid; shoved them in his pack alongside the stick candy.

“Well, it’s almost spring, which means we’ll head out on a regular basis, range a little farther afield. You’ll look after the cabin? Same arrangement?”

“Same arrangement.”

“And I’ll do supply runs as long as they’re on the way, or look for delicacies if you’ve got any in mind. Aside from the literature, which I’ll be looking for anyhow.”

“I didn’t think I’d need to remind you to keep an eye out for your own interests,” Minnie said, amused, and fixed up pork chops and squash and cornbread, the kind of catch-as-catch-can combination that he always saw from her at the end of winter, and he played three rounds of chess with Sweet Dave and declined to commit his losses to memory. By the time he headed home, it was late, and he half-expected—as much as he’d thought about it—Mannix to be pissed, but instead he opened the door and there white boy was, sitting in a chair by the fire, idly turning the pages of his book back and forth, calm as a stick of butter.

“Evening, major,” he said.

Warren felt like he was walking into the teeth of some honeyed trap. He pulled the bag off his shoulder.

“Evening,” he said cautiously.

“The flat-out _strangest_ thing happened while you were _out_ ,” and that couldn’t be a good sign, him getting so sing-songy and syrupy. “Here _I_ was, waiting for you, when up in out of fucking _nowhere_ comes this _other_ black fellow _I_ ain’t never heard tell of before.”

Jerome. He couldn’t keep himself from smiling, which took all that fake sunshine off Mannix’s face and showed him for the pissed-off little shit he was. “I take it if you’d shot him you’d have led with that.”

“He’s out in the stables. Made a convincing case for knowing you. Made a convincing case of knowing you _very_ well.”

“Are we fucking is what you’re trying to ask.”

“Well, are you?” Still too cool to even stand, though his hands were bending the book out of shape.

“Off and on, depending on whether or not he’s in the area.”

“Oh, a question of _physical location_.”

“Look, there’s no need for you to get a burr up your ass about it. In the eventuality you let _anything_ up your ass.” Deepened pissiness at that. “He’s an old friend, the kind of old friend a man’s always happy to see again, a well in many a dry spell.”

“I catch your drift, asshole. In fact you just fucking said it not a minute ago. You could have warned me somebody’d be stopping by not trying to _kill_ us.”

“You mistook a black man for one of your daddy’s Marauders? That I find hard to believe.”

“It’d serve you right if I _had_ shot him.” Mannix tugged his coat a little tighter around himself, and if the corners of his mouth got any further down, they’d be off his chin and hanging down like a beard. “What do we do?”

“Ain’t no ‘we’ in this situation. _You_ take fifty dollars out of your own pocket and go back to Minnie’s and say I asked for you to be put up for a week or so. Seeing how I clarified for her that you maybe weren’t a problem in any kind of immediate sense. You stay there on your best behavior and when I need you, I’ll come fetch you.”

“While you stay here and get laid, is that it?”

“That’s about the size of it.”

“Shit, I could get laid. I could get laid _wherever_ I wanted.”

“Not with you being exclusive to cock you couldn’t, unless you’re so persuasive you’re gonna talk Sweet Dave or Charley into inclinations they didn’t otherwise possess. It’s a lonely way to be up on a mountaintop—why do you think I had an arrangement in the first place?”

“You said yourself you ain’t even interested in that exclusive-like.”

“And I’m not,” Warren said levelly, “but short of us getting a whorehouse around, my choice for women is limited to marrying Gemma and offering her the short end of a shitty stick, which I ain’t gonna do, and which she wouldn’t have to begin with. Pecker travels more reliably than pussy. Hell, you brought yourself on delivery.”

“I ain’t even in a mood to talk to you when you’re like this,” Chris Mannix announced. Warren didn’t have a clue what he was on about. Mannix jammed his hat around his ears. “Have yourself a good time fucking your friend and being a sanctimonious black _fucking_ bastard of a cocksucking _mother_ fucking _shitbird Yankee_ major.”

He took the book with him, maybe to make some kind of point, but more likely because he’d forgotten he was holding it in the first place. Warren shrugged and went out to tell Jerome he’d cleared the cracker out of the house and he was good to come in.

And there he was, standing next to his horse and stroking her fetlock: Jerome Ashby, broad-shouldered and square-jawed and familiar, reassuring as a cold cloth across the brow. Warren laughed and hugged him; Jerome slapped his shoulders once or twice. When he pulled back, he had a nice wide grin on his face that was familiar, too, but wrinkles of his confusion around his eyes. Wrinkles at all was a change, as a matter of fact. Well, they were both getting older, that was a fact.

“I know what you’re gonna say before you say it. What am I doing with a white boy stashed away in my house like a bottle of corn liquor?”

“Well, what are you?”

“He say who he was?”

“We had the kind of cautious conversation that didn’t lead to much getting disclosed, except for some reason he seemed to have it in his head I was part of some lure to kill him.”

“Which I explained to him didn’t make any kind of sense.”

“Well, it got to where I kept emphasizing I didn’t know him from Adam and me and you, on the other hand, were all kinds of familiar and intimate friends, which was why I was there to see you, not him, at which he seemed to take a whole other kind of clammed-up offense and I decided I’d be better off waiting for you out here.”

“More than likely so, but he’s high-tailed it, so come in and get warm and I’ll tell you the tale.”

He got Jerome in and his boots stripped off and laid out the essentials of Chris Mannix and watched Jerome frown over them.

“You’re telling me you’ve got the genuine white son of Erskine Mannix holed up at your place in some kind of cocksucking, unconditional-surrender bare-ass type of deal?”

“You know I do. ‘Cept for the bare-ass part. I mean, I’ve seen it, but he’s skittish about much else.”

“Is he a good lay?”

“As far as his mouth is concerned he’s a natural talent. In fact it’s about the only way to shut him up.”

“And what’s in it for him is the insult it is to his daddy for him to be on his knees half the time for a black man.”

“’Pears so.”

“Well, you’ve lucked yourself into a situation there.”

Warren laughed. “You know I have.”

“Shit,” Jerome said, laughing himself. “Would you lend him out? --The look on your face, Marquis, we’ll say I didn’t mean it. It’d be an embarrassment of riches anyhow, considering I came all this way just for you. And I’m warmed up now.” He stroked Warren’s cheek from chin to ear, and Warren leaned in close and kissed him, glad to have something simple, glad to move forward into this and away from the picture he’d had of Mannix and Jerome together. He didn’t know what look that had put on his face, though, that Jerome had acted that way about it.

They kissed awhile and then moved to the bed, slow and easy, stroking each other, and lard and time made Jerome agreeable to certain things Warren had missed, and although he _hadn’t_ missed giving head and had been glad to have a principle to stand on concerning not doing it, he gave it, by way of recompense. Nice way to pass an hour.

Afterwards, they lay in bed and talked. Jerome had mostly been in the middle states, living like a wild man, hunting and fishing and doing farm-work where farmers would have him, and he’d come back with stories. Warren told him about trying to write.

“I’ve never seen you write so much as a letter,” Jerome said, amused.

“Well, I’m finally sick of being short on amusement and thought I’d make some of my own. And I can string a sentence together and I know how many bullets go in a gun, unlike some of these assholes.”

“Sure, sure. So what’s the hold up?”

“I can write the kind of shit they’re printing, but I don’t like to. I got enough problems without dreaming up more white men with guns.”

“So write yourself.”

“That occurred to me, too, but parts of my life don’t stand up much to scrutiny.”

“Case in point,” Jerome said, giving Warren’s balls a friendly kind of squeeze.

“Ah, I didn’t figure to get into all that anyway, but Lincoln’s a harder figure to dodge.”

“Abraham Lincoln’s gonna get you killed, Marquis.”

“I like folding up a president into a little paper hand puppet and making him talk for me. But you know we disagree about that. Point is, I can’t be accounting full and regular for my evident long-term correspondence with Abraham Lincoln _and_ be writing a full and regular account of my life, even with me getting my rocks off subtracted.”

“So it does bother you, then,” Jerome said, with a little smirk. “Otherwise you’d jump at the chance to gild your reputation and let everybody know the supposed truth.”

“Insights like that are why I choose not to maintain many friendships,” Warren said grumpily. “I choose to save my life however I fucking well want.”

“I do enjoy you living,” Jerome said.

“I appreciate it myself.”

“Fictionalize yourself, then,” Jerome said sleepily, turning over onto his side. “Might be the world’s just not ready for the real Marquis Warren.”

He liked the sound of that. He could imagine saying it to people, all cool and composed: “Of course, some of this is different, on account of the world’s not ready for the real Marquis Warren.” He fell asleep thinking about it, a little smile on his face.

*

They did that for a week and then Jerome went on the way he always did, saying he’d probably make his way back through in four, five months. Warren kissed him goodbye inside and waved him goodbye out on the porch and watched him ride off; then went back into the cabin and made himself a pot of coffee in the rare kind of silence he hadn’t had for months, what with Mannix having turned up and gotten in the habit of talking his damn ear off. He drank most of it and read a little and got kind of bored and fidgety, like he’d lost the habit of being on his own. He wondered what Chris Mannix had gotten up to over at Minnie’s, a question to which the answer had better be “not a damned thing.”

So, fine, he’d had his coffee and his silence; he went to go pick up his fancy boy.

“I’d about thought you’d left him here out of you being in a mood,” Minnie said. “I fished some and got out of him that you had another man around, which I hope wasn’t meant to be any kind of secret.”

“Not to those disinclined to hang me for it, no. He say I hurt his feelings? And where’s he at, anyhow, you kick him out?”

“After that lovely speech you made about how all things considered he might not kill me in my sleep and burn the place down and then you send him here with fifty dollars? No, I ain’t kick him out, he’s just out in Red Rock drinking his sorrows away. He ain’t tell me you hurt his feelings, but that’s not something that’s hard to figure out.”

“You could have let him kill that sorrow here and gotten more money out of him.”

“First few days I did, and then he moped so much I thought being around more white folks might cheer him up, so I pushed him out the door. He still comes back to bed down. Fact is, he wasn’t planning on going at all tomorrow, because he had the idea that was when you might be in, it being a week even then.”

“It’s not a week even now?”

“Six days. Aren’t you sloppy about your calendar.”

He shrugged. “I don’t know, Minnie, it felt like a week. And now I have to wait here for him to drag his ass back?”

“A sensible man would leave a message,” she said, “telling me to tell him, when he _got_ back, that he could settle up accounts and come back to your place, but a _sensible_ man wouldn’t be shacked up with a Confederate white boy waiting for a whole unholy posse to ride up the mountain to kill him, so I imagine you will wait.”

“You imagine right,” Warren said, “and I’ll generously ignore the rest of that and even build up a booze bill here, if that’ll make you more amenable.”

“You sure do know the way to my heart, Major Marquis.”

She poured him a couple fingers of whiskey and some for herself and some for Sweet Dave, who declined to leave his chair once he realized she wasn’t going to bring it to him, which meant Minnie drank that one, too. Liquor loosened her tongue. He sprang on her the question of what Mannix had been up to besides drinking and sulking, and the honest answer appeared to be not much, which had tilted her a little more towards warming to him, which Warren was of mixed feelings about but decided to let ride. He realized he still had Mannix’s candy in his bag.

“He _real_ long-faced about getting kicked out or just a little?”

Minnie sighed. “Dave?”

“Yeah, sweetheart? You decided to bring that over here?”

“No, I ain’t decided to bring it over here, you want it, you can get up and walk over for it. How morose was Mannix over getting left?”

“That’s the white fellow Major Warren’s screwing?”

“He’s been staying here a week and you don’t know his name?”

“I’ve been wondering what to think and feel about that boy for more than a month and Dave don’t know his name and from time to time I think you got the right idea about things and men are better off just being with men because nobody else _deserves_ you. Yeah, honey, the white fellow Major Warren’s screwing.”

“Well, he can’t play chess for shit, I’ll tell you that.”

“I ain’t asked about his chess-playing,” Warren said, “and I could have told you that much for a fact never even having seen him play, ‘cause he’s got no patience. Was he _sad_ is what I’m asking.”

“ _How_ sad,” Minnie said, “since we’ve established that and I don’t want to go through it all again just ‘cause he wants to luxuriate in being proud of it.”

“Sad enough that I don’t think that coat came off his shoulders the entire time he was here,” Sweet Dave said, “if that counts for anything. I’m not an expert in that kind of inverted shit, though.”

Minnie blew him a little kiss. “No, you’re not, are you?”

“I suppose if he was that kind of sad I might as well buy him something to forestall hearing him bitch for weeks on end,” Warren said, thinking of Mannix even sleeping in the coat, the jewel-blue turning black as the sun went down. “Something cheery, kind of fancy but not whorish-fancy, ‘cause there’s a bee in his bonnet about being mistaken for whoring.”

“You’re welcome to look,” Minnie said. “I’m curious myself whether we got any kind of gear around might serve the purposes of a black Union major buying an I’m-sorry trinket for his white Confederate twist.”

“Now that you raise the point, so am I,” Sweet Dave said. “You find it, Major Warren, let us know what it is.”

Warren hunted, rejecting scarves—he’d never gotten his back from Mannix anyhow—and gloves, though he did sock away the idea of a good pair of supple leather gloves for himself, the next time he made a for-true shopping trip. He came up with a hand-tooled holster that somebody gone to the trouble of punching patterns into, flowers and the like, because it tipped in the direction of fancy but was still something Mannix could authentically put his gun in and feel no more of a fool than usual. He got it wrapped up in paper.

“Buying for men seems to be different from buying for women,” Dave said. “I took up with another woman for a week and bought Minnie a leather holster, she’d be liable to put a gun in in it, take it out again and shoot me.”

“Well, shit, Dave, I’m not with him in the same way you’re with Minnie.”

“I misunderstood that, then. I thought the two of you were fucking.”

“Fucking and being next-door to fucking married are not the same kind of animal.”

“All right, major,” Dave said mildly.

So he sat and drank and waited for Mannix, who came in sometime after sundown and, when he saw Warren, took a step back and turned pink.

“Evening, major.”

“Five hours I’ve been waiting here for you, it _ought_ to be evening.”

“Well, I didn’t know that, did I?”

Minnie and Sweet Dave stayed out of it, at least, which was a blessing. Warren put the package under his arm and tried not to feel like a dumbass about it.

“Well, come on if you’re coming,” he said. “I already wasted enough of the day. Settle up and we’ll clear out, I’m sure you’ve gotten on everybody’s last nerve already.”

Mannix scowled at him and settled accounts with Minnie: he wasn’t laying on the charm anymore with her, and Warren liked that, but he was polite.

When they were outside, Mannix turned up the collar of that blue coat of his that by Sweet Dave’s account hadn’t ever come off him, and said, “Your friend gone?” all hard and mocking, which Warren decided to be charitable and ignore.

“Headed out this morning.”

“Jerome Ashby,” Mannix said.

“Sure enough,” Warren said, and then they were saddled up and that was the end of conversation for a while.

Back home, though, Warren didn’t even wait to get him inside; he yanked Mannix’s pecker free of his trousers and stroked him off rough and fast, Mannix hitching his hips up and whining until he came all over himself. Warren squeezed him hard as a conclusion, to put some punctuation on it. He held him by the balls and said, “As far as I recollect, I didn’t make you any kind of promise, did I? Give you any kind of reason to fucking sulk, I take up again with somebody I been with two, three times a year since I don’t know when? Am I wrong?”

Mannix was up on his toes now, trying to lift himself out of Warren’s hand, but the joke was on him ‘cause he didn’t have the height for it. Sweat was on his face.

Warren squeezed him again. “ _Am I wrong_ , white boy?”

“Nossir.”

Warren let him go.

“Damn, major,” Mannix said, adjusting himself. “That wasn’t necessary.”

“That didn’t even fucking hurt, unless you’re some kind of delicate flower the likes of which the world ain’t ever seen before.”

Mannix snorted in horse-like irritation, which made his mount look over at him quizzically. “Come here, then, major, and I’ll _not hurt_ you back.”

“I’d have to trust you for that.”

“And you don’t?”

He considered it and got dismayed by the answer. He unsaddled his horse and gave it fresh feed and water and watched Mannix do the same for his, something in the air between them like a fog, or a cloud full of held-back lightning, and when they got inside, Mannix said, “Come here, then, major,” again, only this time around with some kind of bewitched look in his eyes, and when Warren came closer, Mannix kissed him, full-on sober, open-mouthed but soft. He let Warren’s beard scratch his chin up. Warren lingered on him like he was a note on a fiddle string and when they broke apart for air, he didn’t like not knowing what to do with his hands, didn’t like the feeling on his lips. Mannix got down on his knees and drew him out and sucked him off, slow and tender.

Then he for some reason took his head up in the middle of it all and said, “I’m still so mad at your ass I can’t _fucking_ see straight,” and then went back to it.

Afterwards, Warren gave him the holster.

“This by way of an apology?”

“I told you before, I got nothing to apologize to you for. It’s by way of being a gift.” He shifted. It felt strange, having pillow-talk with Mannix. “The kind of thing a fancy boy gets given in the natural course of things.”

Mannix made a little _oh_ -bubble with his mouth and seemed to accept this; unwrapped the holster and fucking cooed over it like a dove, running his fingers up and down the ridges and detail-work before setting it aside and cuddling up to Warren, tentative-like, the first time he’d ever done that while he was still awake. It was a temporary kind of thing, Warren figured, on account of them having been lonely that last week—Mannix having been lonely, he meant.

“Anybody come by while you were at Minnie’s? Strangers, I mean?”

“Folks looking, little-do-they-know, to spread the word of our coupling? One or two. I did what I _could_ , in the absence of actual _company_.”

“Jerome brought up something.”

Mannix stiffened, like a cat that had gotten doused with a bucket of cold water. “Oh, _Jerome_. What?”

“Well, this is all to anger your daddy. I’m the best choice, being well-known in his circles—”

“Well- _despised_ is more like it, major.”

“—and interested in the matter besides,” he said, moving his thigh up against Mannix’s legs to agreeable response. “But there’s no reason you have to stop at that.”

Mannix frowned. “Major, you lost me.”

“Never a difficult proposition.” He didn’t know why he was pressing the matter, really, except he guessed it was only fair to Mannix to give him the choice himself, and, since he didn’t actually give two shits about being fair to Mannix, he guessed he was doing it for some other reason. Because he didn’t like how the prospect had stuck in his craw and wanted to act like it hadn’t. “Jerome wanted to know if you were agreeable to getting loaned out is the point.”

“Getting loaned out.”

“If another black man had an interested in fucking you—”

“I _see_ the damn _point_ , major, sir,” Mannix said, which was unusual, him calling Warren “sir” when he was persnickety and when they weren’t screwing with him desperate to come. Not vanishingly strange, though. “You want that?”

Warren held his voice level. “What kind of difference would it make to me?” He kept his eyes on the rafters, following them from one wall to the other.

“Well, it’d make some kind of difference to me, and I don’t think I’d like it.” Mannix turned over on his side, showing his back, the long, straight column of his spine. Warren ran a hand down the ladder of Mannix’s backbone through the cotton of his longjohns and Mannix reached behind himself and grabbed on, not easy but tight.

“If you don’t want to do it, don’t do it,” Warren said, not liking how he sounded—that tone of relief, almost like an exhalation. “Nobody’s making you.”

*

Springtime.

“Decent folks,” Mannix said, “would bring the water in and heat it over the stove,” but he stepped gingerly into the creek anyhow and, shivering like mad, tossed the water up around himself in ineffectual little splashes. Warren had half a mind to dunk him under and maybe rub his head against a rock like laundry until his hair was clean.

“Go to Minnie’s if you want to bathe prissy. You came up the wrong mountain if you thought being a fancy boy was gonna mean you got bath salts and steam and your dingus sucked besides.”

“I miss getting sucked,” Mannix said, a little wistfully. He gave up on his splashing and lowered himself down into a crouch and shivered, working himself over furiously with a handful of squishy homemade soap. “You sure you ain’t up for it?”

“The one good thing about screwing your cracker self is being able to stand on principle on not giving head.”

“You _like_ cock, though, major.”

“I like all kinds of things in the world I don’t slobber all over. Count yourself lucky you ever got any.”

Mannix pulled that face he got sometimes when he thought of some past fellow white boy Warren hadn’t asked after but figured for dead. He nodded once, this little jerk of his head, and then went back to scrubbing, now obediently working a lather into his hair. Warren decided to distract him by getting undressed himself. It felt like stripping off some dusty cocoon—he hadn’t had everything off all at once all winter. Mannix flopped on his back, disregarding the chill, a smile emerging. He whistled.

“That’s the full and correct response,” Warren said.

“Full and correct response would have me up and over to you,” Mannix said, “but that’ll have to wait.”

From time to time, Warren felt something for him—amusement, he supposed. He took his own fistful of soap and started to work.

Mannix finished up his own bath, working diligently under the water, and made his way over noisy as a carp. “Do your back for you?”

“You’re agreeable this morning,” Warren said, passing him the soap.

“Major, I’m more agreeable than you on _every_ morning.” He seemed content to keep his balls half-frozen in the creek while he kissed his way up Warren’s thighs, frisky-like, and then popped up, grinning, onto his feet. “All right, _spin_ , motherfucker.”

Warren turned, and then there passed a draggy few seconds in which Mannix did nothing, and then, very softly, he started to wash Warren’s back. It didn’t take Warren long to figure it out. Of course Mannix had never seen him so bare-chested—he hadn’t known, and he hadn’t guessed because he was a willfully stupid dumbass of a Confederate white boy.

“Light as a feather, that feels like fucking nothing,” Warren said.

“Sorry, sir.” He scrubbed harder.

“Scars on my back make my form less agreeable to you, Chris Mannix?” Spitting out the name.

“No, sir.” He felt Mannix trace one of them with one soapy finger, which Warren wasn’t sure he liked any better than Mannix being awestruck and soft about them. “Neither more nor less. From when you was a prisoner?”

 _Neither more nor less_ was mealy-mouthed, meant to appease him, disavow either that he was bothered by them or that he was compelled by them, wanted to lick them all across—Warren was betting on it being either of those two things, or, knowing Mannix, both. “First night.”

Mannix soaped lower, getting his ass and his thighs. “That why you burned ‘em?”

“Burned them to get out. After the whipping I just took more pleasure in it.”

“See why.”

“Well, wonders will never fucking cease, you laying a blessing on the murder of white folks.”

“Fuck you, major, saying I can see a fucking motivation ain’t the same as laying blessing.”

“Suppose that’s true. And _believe_ me, boy, I’d have whipped the skin off your back if it’d been _my_ side caught _you_.”

Mannix snorted and handed him back the soap. “You’d have shot me plain and simple. Which would _at least_ have saved me getting roasted.”

“You’re mixing up your tales. Wasn’t no Union prisoner camp I burned down.”

“Suppose _that’s_ true.” He frowned. “You know those blue boys were there?”

“I sure as hell did.”

“And didn’t give a shit?”

“And didn’t figure the fire for catching so wide or those dumbasses sleeping through it, but didn’t break my heart over it one way or the other.” If they had the kind of talks where they explained such things, he would have told Mannix that what woke him up nights sometimes still was the fear he’d burn down with it himself: when he crawled out of the ash and embers, his blood sizzling where it fell on the hot ground, he was so grateful to be alive, and so eager to stay that way, that he didn’t think on those white men until he was miles away.

“You’re honest anyway, major.” He turned with the expectation that Warren would do his back in return, which Warren for some reason did, laying hands against Mannix’s ribs and narrow hips and well-muscled ass, feeling Mannix’s skin jump under his hands. “You said you’d see us all dead and buried.”

“Well,” Warren said, streaking his thumb down through the suds, cutting a clean line across Mannix’s skin, “some days that’s truer than others.”

“Mm- _hmm_ ,” Chris Mannix said. “Well, cut my legs off and call me shorty, Major _Marquis Warren_ getting _all sentimental_ about a _white boy_.”

He braced himself against Mannix’s hips and Mannix let some thick sound out of his throat.

“Sentimental as all _that_ ,” Mannix said. “Now you _know_ you can’t bend me over and fuck me in a creek-bed, major.”

Warren bit his earlobe; moved lower and bit his jaw. He tasted like soap and clean water. Mannix threw his head back, letting Warren at his neck, and said, soft, “Let’s go inside and cut the cards and you can tell me hit or stay.”

Wanting made Warren’s ears ring a little, but he wasn’t in the mood to be teased. He finished up with a hard suck on Mannix’s throat and then pushed him off. “You’re clean.”

“Dirty me the hell up then.”

“All the times to have this conversation and you pick naked and standing in a freezing creek.”

“I did request something decently heated,” Mannix said, naturally coy, like he’d been waiting all winter to be spiffy and sweet-scented enough to get his ass fucked. Warren tossed him his trousers and boots so they wouldn’t have to walk stripped-bare all the way back to the house, and Mannix dressed hurriedly, clothes sticking to his wet skin, clinging and tight.

Back in the house, they didn’t wait to dry by the fire; Warren shucked him naked again and took him to bed still glistening, drops of water shaking loose from his hair when he hit the sheets.

“No cards?” Mannix said, grinning hard like a fool. The hickey Warren had kissed onto his neck was coming in lividly purple.

“You can’t be trusted to cover your bets. How do you want it?”

“Up my ass, ain’t we established that? You got to be persuaded now?”

The position was what he’d meant, but Mannix seemed genuinely not to know there was more than one way to do it, because he was already climbing out of the bed and bending over it, his ass stuck out in the air like an invitation. Warren hadn’t been thinking of standing, but didn’t want to look a gift fuck in the mouth, so he did it anyhow, and circled Mannix’s asshole with his thumb. Willing though Mannix seemed to be, the little muscles all up his back and backside jumped and went twitchy. Warren wetted his fingers and got one inside—hot and tight as he’d ever hoped—and heard Mannix draw in a breath as sharp as a knife and rock forward onto the bed, not rubbing his cock against it but just holding himself up.

“I can get a little lard if you’ll stay still,” Warren said, considering it. “It’ll go easier, you not having done this in a while.”

He tested a second finger and Mannix bit at his own arm and said, “Yeah,” hoarsely.

“Yeah like you want it _and_ yeah like I can get up and you’ll still be here?”

“ _Yes_ , dammit, major.”

So he came back with the grease and stroked Mannix slippery, easing him until he had three fingers inside him and he was whimpering not with strain or pain but with need and pushing back onto his hand, voice breaking when he cussed. Warren slicked up his own cock then and thrust up into him steady and slow, his hand flat against Mannix’s back, Mannix taking him in, and then at some point something changed and it wasn’t like he was doing and Mannix was being done to but like they were working it together.

“We keep this up I won’t be able to hardly fucking _walk_ ,” Mannix said.

“Who says I need you walking? My plan’s to fuck you so wide open and sore your ass won’t take a damn _chair_ tomorrow, let alone a horse, let alone a walk, fuck you till anybody _looking_ at you gonna know you’ve been fucked.”

“Yeah?” He thrust back, slamming his ass against Warren’s balls. “You gonna raw me like that, major, sir? Is that a fucking promise?”

He put his hands on fancy boy’s hips and held him hard enough to bruise. “Oh, giving you cause for doubt, am I?”

“No, _sir_.”

“Tell me what you’re gonna look like tomorrow, pretty Chris Mannix.”

“Fresh-fucked and bow-legged and, and— _yes, damn you, yes_ —and my own spunk smeared on my mouth and drying there and your fucking hickey on my fucking neck, major, _touch me_ , please—”

Warren got a hand around him and held tight to the base of his cock so he wouldn’t come. “Touch you like this?”

“You know not like that, sir, _please_.”

“How am I gonna get your come on your lips if you spend it all on the bed sheets? You got to ask yourself that.” He kept his rhythm, moving hard against Mannix’s sweet spot, feeling Mannix shake underneath him. “It nearabouts _feels_ like you’re cherry, fancy boy, whatever you say about it. You’re awful tight for wanting this so badly. And soft like velvet.”

Mannix made fists in the blanket. “Meaning I waited too long?”

“You get antsy, waiting to say yes to me? You slip a finger or two inside yourself under the sheets at Minnie’s, pumping your own cock, thinking about me back here?”

“Thinking about you with somebody else, you mean?”

He eased up his grip on Mannix’s cock and stroked him full, up and down, and Mannix about went boneless with happiness.

“You _like_ it,” Mannix said. “You _like_ me being jealous of you, major. You ain’t the only one who can talk, _I_ can talk, major, sir, and you want me jealous and you don’t want to share, neither, you like my ass so tight you know I ain’t even put a finger inside myself. Mm-hm. You like my ass and you like my mouth and you called me pretty, you fucking well did, pretty and fancy, now fuck me, stroke me, major, ‘cause you _know_ I been good for you.”

He wasn’t inclined to reward a speech, but there was something in how Mannix said it that scorched him, that bullshit about them being jealous of each other, the half-true part about him liking Mannix being just his. He figured he could fuck the smugness out of it and keep the rest and so he did—brought Mannix off and then finished soon after. He hitched Mannix up onto the bed and fell there himself, still breathing hard. Both of them sweaty and streaked with grease and come. He could hear his own heart pounding.

“That sure was something,” Mannix said, content as a cat licking its paws. “I’d roll a smoke if I was inclined to get up anytime in the next year.”

Warren chuckled. “What you ought to do is get up and wash yourself and not lie in a fucking wet spot of spunk.”

“I like it.”

“You’ll stop liking it once it gets cold.”

“Well, it ain’t cold yet.” He slung himself over Warren like a bag of feed. “You like that, major?”

“Wet spot speaks to that, doesn’t it?”

“I suppose,” Chris Mannix said, wringing the word out of recognition, evidently wanting something in the way of reassurance, which was the flat-out dumbest thing Warren had ever encountered, since again, he still had Warren’s come up in him.

“I do it again tomorrow, will that be proof enough for you? I do it again as soon as I can fucking breathe and get hard again, would _that_ do it?”

“Major,” Mannix said, delighted, rubbing his head back and forth against Warren’s chest like a caress he was too lazy and fucked-out to reach up a hand for, “you’re gonna _spoil_ me.”

*

“Ah, shit,” Warren said, lowering his rifle.

Mannix rolled over onto his belly and put a hand to his brow, squinting out at the horizon. “What’s the matter, don’t you have a shot? Oh, the partner—well, something’s probably out on him too, or ought to be. Give me a minute and I’ll find out.”

“No need—our boy out there’s already in shackles, which means I know the motherfucker who’s with him.” He pointed. “That’s John Ruth the Hangman.”

“What, he’s bringing Bailey in alive? Somebody for real does that?”

“Just John Ruth. When the Hangman catches you, you hang. Come on, we’ll go down and say hello. If anybody’s gonna get word around about you, it’s John Ruth—gossipy son-of-a-bitch knows everybody and he’s got an opinion on all of it.”

Mannix gave him a hand up. “The way you’re talking I can’t tell whether we like this fellow or not.”

Warren didn’t know himself. He supposed if he had to befriend a white man, and he wasn’t allowed to count Sweet Dave, the closest he’d come was John Ruth, the two of them having shared a steak dinner once and Ruth having been something close to polite. But it was hard to like a man who made a career off insisting he was doing the job better than anyone else. Ruth just plain wasn’t the likable sort. Still, he answered the question he guessed Mannix was asking, which was that he didn’t take John Ruth for a problem.

“Not that I think he’ll like you, ‘cause he won’t, I know that much.”

“He like you?”

“Sort of, but for a reason I ain’t got time to go into and that you’ll keep your mouth shut about if it comes up.”

Mannix made a face. “How am I gonna know if it comes up if I don’t know what the fuck it is?”

“Trust me,” Warren said, “you’ll know.”

They walked down the hill and when they were some safe distance, he halted the both of them and called out to Ruth, announcing himself. They had a prolonged exchange of verification—“Myself and a partner I seem to have picked up,” Warren said, “neither of us planning on taking your bounty from you. I mean, we were aiming for him, but seeing how we came down instead of shooting the both of you from afar, and he’s only worth a thousand, you can see we changed our minds. Now can I stop hollering at you? I’m about to lose my voice.”

Ruth put down his pistol and let them close. “Who’s your partner, anyhow? I always heard you for the working-alone sort—aw, hell.” He lifted again and took aim, square at Mannix. “You know who the fuck that is?”

“Major,” Chris said nervously, putting up his hands. He plastered on an appeasing kind of smile, his I-probably-fucked-up-but-I-bet-I-can-charm-you smile. “Friend, why not lower that and hear a defense of my character first?”

Warren snorted but kept a careful eye on the gun. “I don’t know that I’d defend his character, but yeah, John Ruth, I know who he is. And who his daddy is. And I’d take it as a personal favor if you didn’t shoot him.”

“Never thought I’d live to hear that,” Ruth said, but he _did_ lower the gun. Lowered it, but didn’t holster it, like he was still trying to make up his mind, which pissed Warren off a little. “Just so we’re clear, that’s Erskine Mannix’s youngest boy, Chris. Mannix like Mannix’s Marauders.”

“All of which I was up front and clear about to the major when we _met_ ,” Mannix said, his hands still up, grin still fixed and anxious. “Major, a little more vouching on your part wouldn’t go a-fucking-miss.”

“Truth is,” Warren said, letting Mannix get behind him a little, “ _Chris_ Mannix has got no real cause to love his daddy well, not any more, and as far as his former activities—”

“Damned atrocities is what they were.”

“As far as all that,” Warren said, not liking his tone, the implication that he somehow cared more about it than Warren did, “far as I know, there’s no bounty on his head for them, so they’re no interest of yours. Anyway, he’s something close to repentant. Despising your kin will sometimes have that effect.”

John Ruth scrutinized Mannix like sin would bloom on him like syph and then suddenly he gave a booming laugh and his gun found his holster. “I’ll be—you’re the one they drove off, ain’t you? Right, right, Chris Mannix, the lavender one. Yeah, I wouldn’t reckon you for too fond of your blood _or_ the Marauders. What’d they do to that fellow they caught you with?”

“I doubt I can recollect it all,” Chris said, his voice suddenly as cold as Warren had ever heard it, all that sugar gone out of him, like he no longer gave a damn whether John Ruth put a bullet in him or not.

“Scratch-branded ‘Sodom’ across his forehead, I heard,” Ruth said, to Warren now and oblivious to Mannix, “beat him black and blue and white from the broken bones, gelded him, and finished it all by shoving a pistol up his ass and emptying it. Now, all of that I figure they’d have done some of anyhow, on account of not being kindly disposed to the pastime, but in _particular_ they done it that way because Erskine Mannix wanted to make an example to his son which way his habits would take him if he weren’t blood. They booted you out, or you ran?”

“They burned his dick and balls on the fire and smeared me with the ashes and turned me out,” Mannix said levelly, “and first they took the bullets out of my gun or every last motherfucking one of them would be dead and on that fire too.” He was still smiling, but it seemed separate from the rest of his face and fucking ghostly besides, like it was coming off the edges of him. “By the time I found ammunition, I thought of finding the major, instead. As you see.” He spread his arms, flaring the coat, which proved nothing to anyone. Warren’s scarf might have, if John Ruth had known the provenance, which he didn’t. Under better circumstances, Chris would have known that.

Warren touched his shoulder and Mannix wheeled on him, two shades whiter than usual. He’d be more likely to bite than kiss, the way he was. “Why don’t you walk a while or something?”

Mannix licked his lips. “Walk?”

“Just apace and let me and John Ruth here talk and you can collect yourself.”

Mannix jerked his chin up in some kind of half-nod and stalked off stiff-legged.

“Wonders really won’t cease,” John Ruth said, watching him go. “Erskine Mannix’s swish of a son and you partnered up. I suppose he figures that for a way to get his daddy’s goat.”

“Supposing his daddy knew a tenth of it,” Warren said calmly, “his goat would be gotten pretty good.”

Ruth’s mouth furrowed under his mustaches. “You suggesting what I take you to be suggesting?”

“That depends on what you take me to be suggesting.”

“Something in the way of an—an _amorous_ connection. Between you and Chris fucking Mannix?”

“Something in the way of that,” Warren said. He stayed careful. “But there’s no bounty out for either of us on that, either. If it offends you, say the word and we’ll draw back the way we came, not camp together tonight like we were thinking.”

“Hell,” Ruth said, grimacing, “I ain’t particular as all that as long as you don’t get up to it in the damn vicinity.”

“ _I_ might be particular,” the long-silent Bailey said, and John Ruth snapped out a fist quick as anything and popped him hard in the mouth and advised he get particular about the experience of spitting his teeth on the fucking ground in that case.

“You might want to go get him, anyways,” Ruth said, pointing after Mannix, who was glowering down at a nearby creek-bed like it had done him wrong. “And as it fucking may be that if you’re inclined to take his part he’s on the road to being better than the rest of his fucking family, you can express on my behalf it was something other than polite to have a chuckle at what had amounted to his friend. It was more surprise and that German word for feeling glad at Erskine Mannix getting a cocksucker son than it was happiness at what’d become of the other man. You can tell him that.”

“Obliged, and it’ll be much appreciated,” Warren said, which was the kind of thing he had to say from time to time to humor the man.

He made his way after Mannix and, after checking that Ruth was well-occupied in building a fire and clouting Bailey into the dust, sighed and put an arm over his shoulders.

“Cry if you’re gonna cry,” Warren said, “but don’t press up against me or him over yonder’s gonna spend the rest of his days not thinking well of you, and he won’t spread word you’re a fancy boy, he’ll spread word you’re weak.”

Mannix sucked in a long breath. He was still pale-faced, but his eyes were dry. He slumped slightly against Warren, but that was all, and after a bit he shrugged him off and focused on fussing around with a loose thread on his coat where he’d caught it in some briars a few weeks back. “You didn’t need to trouble yourself on coming over.”

“Well, we never talked about it. Your circumstances.”

“We never talk about anything,” Mannix said.

Warren wrote that off as him being morose, because he had trouble thinking of subjects they hadn’t touched on from time to time, especially in bed, in that still gray semi-darkness that came between them laying their heads to pillow and actually falling asleep. He waited, getting a little impatient but not as impatient as he would have figured himself.

“Most of it you probably guessed anyway.”

“I knew there must’ve been somebody. Somebody in particular, I mean, and I figured him for dead, even dead at your daddy’s hands. The details were new, but I don’t blame you for not airing them sooner.”

“Does belatedly account for my disinclination to get fucked, is what you’re thinking,” Chris said, with a wan little smile that Warren was almost glad to see. “They had him bent over the stewpot still on the fire—I could smell his skin burning—and they told him he was gonna get what he seemed to want, and he thought it was one thing and it was another. But of course he couldn’t see. Maybe even couldn’t feel, at that point—couldn’t tell it was iron _until_.” He got the thread loose and let the wind carry it off his fingers. “It ever occur to you I might get you killed, major? Killed dead and dickless with a pistol shoved up your ass?”

“Shit, fancy boy, I thought of half that before I had you the first time. We’ve been over this.”

“Yeah, yeah, we’ve been over it.” He scrubbed his hands over his head until his hair was sticking out at all kinds of crazy angles like two dozen rooster combs. “Pence. That was his name, in case you were wondering. Brandon Penny, but I called him Pence. Anyway, now he’s dead and fucking buried. Not that you’d have liked him.” He frowned. “Not that you’d have liked me.”

“I don’t like you now,” Warren said, “and by all accounts you’ve gotten considerably more tolerable.”

Chris gave a small chuff of a laugh. “Yeah.”

“John Ruth apologized, in a manner of speaking, for saying what became of your boy.”

“I don’t give a shit about that.”

“No, but you’ll pretend.”

He rubbed at his hair again. “He’s that important?”

“In this business, he’s as close to important as we get, and he’s halfway to being an acquaintance, which is more than I get to know most people.”

“All right then. ‘Halfway to being an acquaintance’—you’ve got one hell of a way with words, major. You told him about our situation?”

“He’s amenable to us not being dead or in a jailhouse provided you don’t climb on my pecker anywhere he’s within earshot.”

“He should be so lucky I _did_.”

“I’ve lost people too, for what that’s worth,” Warren said, surprising himself, since he hadn’t thought he would say anything about it. All the days he’d ever grieved were ashy and gray in his memory, the sky turned slate-colored with rain, but there’d been nobody there to turn his collar up against it or bring him in if he’d wanted to stand out and half-drown. A saner man would have gotten some sort of community, his folk around him, but Warren had never been that way. He’d held onto one person at a time only, and time and again he’d lost. He’d been alone a long while before Mannix had come up the mountain.

Chris was looking at him, head turned sideways. “Yeah, I figured on that, major, sir. You got nightmares too.” He canted so that his shoulder butted up against Warren’s. “Guess neither one of us can go falling in each other’s arms—not that you’d be like to—but if you wanted to say instead of writing shit down all the fucking time, I’d keep my mouth shut till you were finished.”

The stupid thing was Warren could imagine that, a little, but then he frowned. “What do you mean, writing shit down?”

“You scribbling in your fucking journal that you’re so hell-fire afraid I’m gonna look at.”

“Shit, white boy, that’s not a journal, I’m writing a fucking book, one of your piddly little dime novels. Bad luck, letting you see that.”

And suddenly his boy was all pink-cheeked, open-mouthed astonishment, so delighted he ought to have been smacking his lips over something. “Well, _Major Warren_.”

“Yeah, well,” Warren said, looking away, feeling his own face heat up a little, “that’s why.”

“I’d kiss you if grim-face fucking death himself wasn’t over yonder,” Chris said. “So’s you know. It’s fetching as all hell, seeing you flustered.”

“Get on with walking back, if you’re in a better mood, and leave off being fetched. Consider we’ve got a kind of business to transact here.”

“What’s better for our business _than_ me being fetched?” He touched the fingers to the brim of his hat. “Ask yourself _that_ , major.”

When they made their way back to John Ruth, bent over and poking hard at the fire, Mannix had worked himself over to look something like ordinary folks.

“No hard feelings, Mr. Ruth?”

Ruth was pucker-mouthed, probably torn between wanting to explain that he sure as hell did have hard feelings and knowing that having put his foot in the shit so recently forbade him to mention them. He fixed things up neat for himself by saying that anyway there was rabbit and some roasted potatoes. Mannix, used to Warren, accepted that as an answer and set about making a plate for himself and eating with his fingers like a savage.

Ruth seemed to figure the safest course was to ignore him. He slopped some rabbit and gravy onto his own plate and then cleared his throat a couple of times.

Fuck, if Warren hadn’t gotten so distracted by Mannix’s hurt feelings, he could have given him fair warning while they’d been away.

“When last we spoke,” John Ruth said, “you, uh, kept a letter on you. The Lincoln letter?”

Chris looked up from sucking marrow out of a rabbit bone, caught one look at Warren’s face, and put his head back down. Warren made a note to buy him something.

He nodded at John Ruth.

“Do you still carry it?”

He chuckled warmly, his talking-to-white-people chuckle, which made Chris’s eyes dart up again, having somehow not heard it before. “You know I do.”

“I understand if you don’t want to produce it, especially over a dinner table,” Ruth said, “but—if you could be persuaded—”

“Time’s battered it a little,” Warren said, “and you’re right, I usually let it lay—keep it right here,” patting the pocket over his heart, which already had John Ruth getting misty-eyed, “but, given your, ah, understanding over me and him, and the shared dinner and all that, I’d be willing to make an exception.”

John Ruth looking like Christmas had come early; Mannix not even risking looking up from his supper, like it’d bite his nose off if he did. Bailey just ignoring them all and cramming his mouth full of blackened potato.

Warren wiped his hands off carefully, like he couldn’t risk even a drop of grease, and Ruth hurriedly did the same. Then Warren produced it. Took it out of its envelope like it was as delicate a process as taking a cherry out of its own skin.

*

“A _letter_ from the _President_ of the _United States_ ,” Mannix said.

“You get awfully talkative sometimes when I’d think an ass-fucking would keep you quiet,” Warren said.

“Now, major, you _really_ wanted me not to talk, you and me would be exclusive to blowjobs.” Irritatingly true, and all the more so because Chris Mannix had his own ways of getting fetching, and having his ass in the air unconcernedly while the rest of him lay over their stacked saddles and he dug his hands into the grass by the tent-wall and ran his mouth all the while was one of them. “Wait until everybody hears I’m nightly sucking the cock not only of Major Marquis Warren, feared black cavalry—yeah, yeah _, sir,_ like that—murderer, but _possessor of correspondence_ with _Abraham fucking Lincoln_. Specially if they keep on being as dumb as your John Ruth and not knowing a fake for a fake.”

“My ass, _nightly_ ,” Warren said. “You haven’t _nightly_ done anything since you figured out getting to bed first would mean you could hog all the fucking blankets.”

Chris thrust back onto him. “You feeling neglected, major?” His voice took a turn for the sultry, which ought to have been funny but instead quickened Warren’s pace a little. “You want me on my knees for you every night and my _hands_ and knees for you every morning? When we’re back home and you’re tucked up writing, you want me to sit under your desk and keep my mouth open for you, keep your cock warm for you?”

“Maybe what I ought to do is call back John Ruth and soon-to-die fucking Bailey,” Warren said, reaching around for Mannix’s dick and stroking him softer than he knew Mannix wanted, just to see him twist and hear him keen, high and desperate, even more so once he took his hand away, “have ‘em watch you fall to pieces for me, or better yet, I’d share your ass out after all, white boy. Have _everybody_ take turns on you, bang you like a fucking drum. Yeah, whimper all you want, I know how bad you need it. I think I’d let one of them fuck your ass while I fucked your mouth, keep you open at both ends like you were on a spit. Go on, Chris, come for me.”

Chris whined, the noise of him almost making Warren come first. “Touch me, please, sir, please, I can’t like this, I fucking need you.”

One of these days, Warren was going to get him to come untouched, even if it took hours of teasing him, hours of touching and sucking and fucking him every which way but that, but it’d have to wait until they hadn’t talked him up to the brink himself. He stroked his hand down Mannix’s back and Mannix trembled. It’d be a project for when they were home again and he could get Chris all spread out open-legged and sloppy on the bed, face up so Warren could keep an eye on him and make sure he didn’t press against the mattress, his asshole fingered, his nipples bitten and sucked, bruises darkening against his hips and thighs, mouth swollen and ragged like a torn-up plum, his hot and bothered fancy boy rode hard and put away fucking wet and restless.

“ _Marquis_ —”

He stroked him hard and full and Chris came with an undignified yelp that somehow made Warren finish too, ridiculous as it was, and then they collapsed together, all sweaty, and Warren rolled off him and then pulled Chris down atop him. Chris licked sweat off his mouth and kissed him.

“You,” Mannix said, sounding tuckered-out, “have got a sadist’s tendencies, major. And some unseemly fixations. Another reason you wouldn’t have been no kind of presidential pen pal.”

“Keep patting yourself on the back on that one, ‘cause you’re the only white man’s figured it for a lie so far.”

“Northerners are just looking to be cozened by you is the problem. They don’t like to think you might _hate_ them. See, down South, we _know_ y’all hate us, and we hate you right back, friends with the President or not. So we ain’t gonna be bought off by anybody vouching for your character, ‘cause at the end of the day, we know we ain’t gonna be sitting ‘round a campfire holding hands and singing. Letter from the President just says maybe you’re under the impression white folks _don’t_ hate you, so you’re not gonna like it when they do, and _that’s_ a problem. That’s the Southern mind.”

“If you’re bucking to never get laid again, feel free to keep lecturing me about the Southern mind.”

Mannix laughed a little and moved his head into the crux of Warren’s shoulder. “Tell me I’m wrong, then.”

“I wouldn’t go that far.”

“You wouldn’t go _halfway_ to that far, major, and you know it.” He threw his leg over Warren’s. It was another ten minutes or so—Warren had thought he’d gone to sleep—when he said, “There’s always Minnie and Sweet Dave, though.”

“True.” He let his fingers uncurl on Chris’s shoulder.

“You know it is,” Chris said sleepily.

*

They ran into John Ruth one more time before they went back home again at the start of fall, and that was in some podunk little town where Mannix had given up a full hundred dollars to the bathhouse proprietor to cordon off a floor for them in the second place and let Warren in in the first. That was one hell of a night. Both of them flushed, half-silly with booze and steam, eventually crammed into one tub, bodies slick against each other. He even let Chris run on about the merits of hot water.

In the morning, stale porridge and John Ruth, which was, Chris observed through the time he spent rubbing his aching hungover head, one hell of a fucking comedown.

Warren couldn’t afford to be that rude. “Have breakfast?”

“Obliged.” Ruth kicked out a chair and fell into it, keeping his eyes mostly on Warren in the seeming general hope that if he ignore Mannix persistently enough the boy would vanish off the face of the earth and not complicate things by making the one black man Ruth half-liked into some dumbass race traitor swish. “How’s the hunting?”

“Can’t complain. Yourself?”

“Hard but honest.” Which had to be some sort of dig at Warren for picking off his bounties the easy way, though he wasn’t going to be bothered by that. Chris started to bristle and Warren stepped on his foot a little under the table. “I spread rumors of this whole— _plan_ of yours, per your damn request. Don’t blame me if the two of you end up at the end of a rope.”

“Well, who’d we blame but the _Hangman_?” Chris said, and Warren stepped harder and Chris winced a little and glared at him.

Ruth ignored him, which made Warren the only one at the table everybody was talking to.

“There’s the Jody Domingre gang, they’re worth looking out for. If you wanted to go in together on it, there’s enough to split and still set us up with fortunes.” He crammed the last bite of porridge in his mouth with his hands and then stood up. “Think on it a little.”

“I don’t want that asshole anywhere near our business,” Mannix said, back in their room, flung across the bed like some kind of Southern belle.

“There’s no ‘our’ business,” Warren said for probably the hundredth time. “You get a cut out of _my_ business on account of being intermittently fucking helpful and doing shit like bribing bathhouse men.”

“Yeah, well, you sang a different tune on that _last night_.”

Warren pointed at him. “You’ve got to try to stop getting serious concessions out of a man when you’re wrapped all around him like a python.”

Chris flashed him a grin and then said, “Should I wrap myself up on you now and say again that I _don’t_ want that _asshole_ anywhere near _our_ business?”

“I’m too damn old to get seduced by you anytime you want something. What’s your grudge against John Ruth, anyhow? As far as I can tell, he never talks to you enough to have occurred your lifelong fucking enmity, unless you’re still on him about telling me about Pence.” Which he supposed for justification enough, but Mannix was already shaking his head.

“I’m just about over white folks,” Chris said, with no trace of irony in him. “He got no call to look at me any way close to how Minnie does. It’s pure fucking showing off is what it is, major. Like he’s fucking better than.”

“What, better than you? He is, you cracker-ass white boy. And that ain’t showing off, he’s just fucking older than you, he _fought_ in that war your daddy was so in love with.”

“All’s I’m saying is white men fought and died on both sides of it and it was a war like any other war, except for the point of it.” He popped his head up like a gopher. “You saying John Ruth’s better than me ain’t the same as saying you _like_ him better than me, is it?”

“As far as liking, you and John Ruth are even in that I don’t really give a shit about either one of you.”

Chris seemed satisfied by that. “Then what do you make of his proposal, sir?” Like he didn’t know what he was doing with that “sir,” spreading it out thick as butter.

Warren laid down beside him and closed his eyes. “I think more than two bounty hunters working together—hell, more than one, for that matter—is a good way to make your work noisy and fucking noticeable and that’s a good way to get shot. I further think that, admire the man though I do, I got no interest spending weeks hip-to-hip with a fellow who gets antsy over how I get off. Or who I get off with, for that matter.”

“There you go,” Chris said complacently. “And who the fuck is Jody Domingre, anyway?”

“I told you to memorize those warrants.”

“Well, major, you can’t blame me for not doing it, you tell me to do all kinds of things.”

“You’re bucking for something that I ain’t gonna give you until we get somewhere you can’t hear so much through the walls,” Warren said, without opening his eyes, “so we’ll call all that ‘reserved’ and then we can have an actual conversation. Do you or do you not know who Jody Domingre is?”

“He’s thirty thousand dollars on the hoof,” in a near-worshipful tone. “More in piecework, if we get the rest of them—now, we’d be outgunned, which is maybe what Johnny Ruth figures on fixing, partnering up, but I call us both good enough shots to not need the help. We could retire on that, major, we surely could.”

“I like hearing you talk about retiring when you’ve only done eight months of honest work in your whole life.”

Chris ignored him. “You could write and I could, mm, breed horses. And do that thing we talked about that one time, where I—” He stopped, and the brick-red flush on him was something other than embarrassment over sex talk, which Warren couldn’t remember him having ever had to begin with.

Warren knew well enough what Rubicon he’d come to that he didn’t want to cross: he’d dipped his toe into imagining a life they could maybe live together, some sort of way. His skin felt tight around his bones. “You planning out our old age together, Chris Mannix? Ain’t that sweet.”

“My old age, anyway, since you’re due to keel over years before.”

“I can age gracefully. Meanwhile, you ain’t never seen a fancy boy with creases at the corners of his eyes. I’ll just put you out to pasture when I’ve ridden the shine off your ass and get somebody new.”

“Won’t _Jerome_ be sad? Knowing once you had a taste of _me_ , he couldn’t be enough again?”

It felt comfortable, for the two of them to be trying to cut each other, but it didn’t spark him the way it used to: he didn’t feel the urge to flip Mannix over and fuck the argument into him, impress with fingerprint-bruises how little it all meant to him. And time, and all that time alone, had fucked up their ability to argue right: he kept wanting to compliment Mannix on taking that dig about replacing him and twisting it into self-flattery. Something about it reminded him of Mannix, lying on his stomach in bed with the Lincoln letter, reading it aloud and congratulating him on a good turn of phrase.

“You disliking Jerome doesn’t do a thing but make you seem petty.”

“You _fucking_ Jerome _and_ me don’t do a thing but make you seem avaricious.”

“Where’d you learn a word like ‘avaricious,’ anyhow?”

“You used it in chapter four,” Chris said, eyes rolled up to heaven in appeal. “Where the _avaricious_ Union captain stole the uniforms sent for the black troops and sold them for the cloth-value. Damn, major, keep track of your own fucking story.”

Warren looked sideways at Mannix looking at the ceiling. He thought about thirty thousand dollars. Mannix smelled like soap.

So as it happened, they didn’t partner up with John Ruth: they just went home.

*

For a time, he figured the only thing that’d make their slide into winter notable was the day Chris, going to go pitch his cigarette out the window, went still there and said, “White fellow coming up. White fellow _not_ Sweet Dave, _not_ John Ruth. Younger, with a beard all down his chest, ugly as fucking sin. You want me to shoot him?”

“Why, you recognize him from a bounty sheet?”

“No, but white and with a gun on our land don’t make me want to throw him a damn party, considering the bounty on _you_.”

“It tickles me, this newfound willingness of yours to shoot your fellow white man on my say-so. But no, fancy boy, since you’ve got a bead on him already, let’s wait and see what he’ll do. If he’s out to make his fortune on my head, _then_ we can kill him.”

Chris brightened, pulling back from the window with a chipper kind of look on his face. “If he’s out to make his fortune on your head, how about we settle for _learning him_ the likelihood of that happening? I’m talking a real old-fashioned shit-kicking, major, but then we _turn_ him around like a wind-up soldier and send him marching back to my daddy.”

“I ain’t partial to letting people who want me dead walk around out in the world.”

“I ain’t partial to it either, and _once_ we’ve gotten the word out, it’s a different kind of thing. Our present arrangement don’t preclude me wanting some kind of justice from that asshole.”

“No, and it don’t preclude _me_ wanting some kind of justice from assholes trying to _kill_ me, neither. And what’s our present arrangement, if it ain’t that?”

“Nothing, major, never mind. Quit scribbling and come eyeball him.”

Warren put his pen down, leaving his savvy, erudite, well-hung hero in the muck and blood of the war for now, and glad of the interruption if it came to that, and claimed the lion’s share of the window.

“Yeah, that’s a Confederate white boy if I’ve ever seen one.”

Mannix squinted. “He don’t look a thing like me, major.”

“He’s uglier, I’ll give you that. And older.”

Chris made an appealing kind of _pshaw_ noise. ‘I’m prettier _and_ I walk faster—major, it’ll be Judgment Day before this fellow creeps on up to us. How’s the writing going?”

“War scenes dragging on for half past forever and me wondering if I can skip ‘em is how it’s going.”

Chris pulled back a little from his view, face wrinkled up pug-like. Warren had learned to beware of that look, because it was the Chris Mannix Has Just Confirmed Something look, and it didn’t often spell anything good for him, because his white boy had some kind of freak natural-born talent for spotting the loops and curlicues in things. “You don’t like it much, do you? Talking about the war, I mean. My daddy, my older brothers, they always told war stories, but you don’t, and not just to me, either. You don’t even write that shit down without breaking a sweat.”

“I’m happy as a pig in shit with your cause being lost, white boy. The road to getting there wasn’t easy, though.”

“You’ll write through it.”

“It’ll write through me, more like.”

“Ain’t no river of ink gonna drown _you_ , major,” Chris said, patting him lightly on the chest. “But you need to talk about it, I can listen.”

“News to me.”

Chris shrugged. “Gag me, then, sir, and find out.”

Appealing thought, but if he gagged Mannix, he’d have other thoughts on his mind than the fucking war—though he supposed he could always gag him, _fuck_ him, and _then_ get around to talking about his feelings. He always felt looser-tongued he’d gotten his ashes hauled, anyhow. It wasn’t the worst idea Mannix had ever had, though that might’ve just been because there was such competition for the position.

“You’ve seen bloody things,” Warren said. “I got no great insight for you.”

“Major, I’ve _done_ bloody things. I got no great insight at all. But I got ears.”

Warren watched the creeping approach of the Confederate outside his walls, shoulder-to-shoulder with the one _inside_ his walls. He said—almost more out of idle curiosity than anything else, because he wasn’t convinced it made any kind of difference and was even less sure it ought to—“You ever wish any of those things undone?”

“Now, you mean?”

“Now or then.”

He kept his eyes on the window, but he saw the shadow against the glass change just a little as Mannix jerked his chin up a half-inch or so.

“But it can’t be that way,” Chris said. He didn’t ask if Warren felt the same way about anything—he probably knew him well enough, funny as that was, to know that he didn’t. “It ain’t your plan to let this dumbass get all the way inside our house before you put a shotgun under his chin, is it? ‘Cause if so, I ain’t scrubbing up blood if you take a mind to _plug_ him.”

Warren rolled his eyes. “You ought to be grateful there’s generally someone around I want to shoot more than you. Yeah, he’s close enough we can go out. You keep your gun on him and let me do the talking.”

Mannix gave him a sloppy salute and they headed out, boots crunching the drying grass.

“Hold up a little, white boy,” Warren said, and to his delight, Chris faltered a little in his peripheral vision and had to be shooed back to heel again. “ _Other_ white boy. Never thought I’d have a surplus around.”

“Don’t call this asshole ‘white boy,’” Chris said. “White _asshole_ , more like—and, _ooh, major_! I know him!” He about broke into a little soft-shoe but the gun never wavered, which was why Warren liked him, whenever he did like him. “That’s Sandy Smithers’s boy. Chester Charles. Now, _Chester Charles Smithers_ , what in the _hell_ are you doing thinking you can just _stroll_ up to _Major Marquis Warren’s_ cabin and not get yourself _noticed_?”

“We talked about me doing the talking,” Warren said. A cold so bone-deep it burned like fire settled down over him like a blanket. He showed Chester Charles Smithers his teeth in a big, wide grin. “I’ve heard tell of your daddy, boy.”

The gun had taken all the piss-and-vinegar out of him as well as if it were running down his leg: Chester blubbered a little, his lips blowing spit and snot. “I can turn around.”

“It’s your opinion I should let you head right back down the mountaintop again?”

“I’ve got money.”

“So do I, son, so I don’t give a shit about it one way or the other.”

Mannix wasn’t dancing in place anymore—he’d recognized Warren’s tone and become the sleek, obedient, engine-run creature he turned into whenever there was killing around. Warren could have lined up a row of marbles along the barrel of his pistol and not a one would have fallen off, it was that steady. That made him recollect that he did have some duty to his personal white boy, though what, in this case, he didn’t know. Couldn’t put it on justice’s scale opposite the weight of all the dead.

Chester’s eyes kept darting over to Chris to keep his eyes on the gun and then all of a sudden what was left of his color bled out of him like he’d been stuck: “You ain’t Chris Mannix?”

Chris stayed tight-lipped.

Warren, with an unfamiliar kind of clench around his heart, something more than fondness, said, “You can answer him, fancy boy.”

“In the fucking flesh I am,” Chris said.

Chester’s lips wobbled. “Fancy boy?”

“Look at the clothes I got him in and tell me he ain’t the fanciest you’ve ever seen,” Warren said. “He’s the best thing ever became of a Southern boy rode his way up here— _I_ ride him, get him so sprawled-out and sweaty-desperate for it that he can’t do without. He loves it. Don’t you love it, Chris Mannix?”

“Oh, I surely do,” Chris said, all liquid seriousness, like a dash of mercury.

“Fuck him like he ain’t never been fucked before, and he’s _been_ fucked before.”

Chester was shaking like a leaf now: even the end of his beard was trembling.

“Question is, what do I do with _you_?” Warren said. “See, I already got the one white boy around, I don’t need another. And like every other black man in this godforsaken country, I have considerable reason to despise your daddy the general.” He could settle, he supposed, for cutting off Chester’s ears and maybe all the fingers off his left hand, if he did it slow enough. Anything short of death and a tongue-cutting ought to keep Chris happy, and that gave him a wide field to move around in. A whole lot of bloodshed could be accommodated before death got brought into it.

“I’ll suck you,” Chester said desperately. “Don’t kill me, I’ll suck your cock.”

Chris stepped forward. “You’ll do _what_ now, Chester Charles Smithers?”

Warren laughed. “Oh, you’ve done it now, Chester. Ease up there, Chris.”

Chris stayed poised for just a second or two longer and then, all the muscles in his face still drawn as tight as cords, fell back.

“You can do whatever you want with me, dammit, just don’t kill me!”

Warren pointed at Mannix, at his slightly heaving chest: “He’s the one argued beforehand for sparing your life, and if you keep talking like that, he’s gonna feel differently, I guarantee you that. He’s got a mean jealous streak.”

Chester closed his eyes. Tears bristled around the stubby little eyelashes.

It wasn’t the crying that made Warren rethink cutting off his fingers, or at least he didn’t think it was—he’d seen white folks on the edge of coming pain get wet-eyed and bawling before. No, his fuse had just gotten ground into the dust, that was all. He felt steady. Felt separate. He wasn’t sure he liked it, or rather he was sure he did and wasn’t sure he ought to. Beating the white off the Smithers boy’s skin would improve his mood on that score, if nothing else.

“Oh, relax and stop blubbering,” Warren said. “Nobody’s gonna kill you.”

“I wouldn’t go that far, motherfucker makes eyes at you again. Suck your cock, he says,” Chris muttered, “like he could do it half as well. With me standing right the fuck here.”

“You’re not gonna kill me?”

Warren shook his head. “There’s a cost to that, though. You listening?”

“I’m listening!”

“Chris here is gonna keep that gun on you a while, and you’ll stay limp as a sack of flour while I work you over, which isn’t gonna be pretty, but it’s gonna be something you survive. That’s step one, and it’s step one because of what your daddy did during the war and because you came up here to put a _bullet_ in me. Step two is when you pick your sorry ass off this hillside and go down it again and get back to wherever you came from, you spread the word of where you found Chris Mannix, and what you found him doing.”

He stepped close to Chris and stroked his hand down Chris’s neck, dipped his fingers under his collar, rubbed his thumb along the top of his shoulders. Let Chester see him doing it.

“You got that?”

“I got it,” Chester said. His face was still blanched out, but he looked better, knowing he wasn’t going to die or be made to suck on anything—it was like he had some good news between his teeth that he could bite down on like a stick to ride out a fit.

Warren worked him over quick and thorough. He knew how to avoid broken bones—how to give beating that would swell up Chester Smithers’s eyes and knock out a couple teeth and hammer away at his thighs until every step was a misery for at least a week but all those steps stayed possible anyhow. He broke the white asshole’s nose, though, because he wanted a little more blood than he was seeing. He didn’t let Chris in to help with it, either, because the ornery bastard _still_ might have killed him for volunteering his services and because this was Warren’s business. Because his hatred for Smithers was old.

After they put Smithers back on the road with a boot in his ass, Chris braced Warren up against the back wall of the cabin and went down on his knees in the dirt and sucked him aggressively, pointedly, long and hard, taking him all the way to the root just to prove he could. His fingers stroking away at the holster Warren had bought for him the whole damn time. “See Chester Smithers do _that_ ,” he said, coming up off his knees and wiping the remains of Warren’s spunk off his mouth. “Nobody—no white boy—gonna treat you like I treat you, sir, isn’t that right?”

“You know it is,” Warren said. “Come here.” He kissed Chris and, tasting himself, tried not to be perturbed by it. He’d taken on a passel of trouble letting this boy stay and he hadn’t even known the half of it at the time.

Chris slumped against him. “You want to tell me what had you riled about Sandy Smithers?”

“Him being fucking Sandy Smithers isn’t enough?”

“I got one side of every story,” Chris said, “just looking for the other.”

Warren sighed and told it to him, no gag necessary. Chris took it all in like a sponge and then said, quietly, “You ever want to hit me too?”

“This one of those things you turn out to like?”

“No, dammit, major, I’m just saying—who I been, what I’ve done, whose son _I_ am. You could.”

He traced his thumb along Chris’s cheekbone and Chris closed his eyes. Warren didn’t want to hit him. There was no change in him on that front—he had never thought about it at all. He said, “I’m not that complicated, white boy,” a little more harshly than he meant to, “I don’t hit where I fuck, even given that I’m fucking you. And I don’t need to color you up making any kind of statement, like beating you black-and-blue whenever the mood strikes is gonna equalize things any, take the scars off my back or the dead men off the field. All it’ll do is make you less appealing to look at.”

“Well,” Chris said, “leave it to me to spoil a damn mood then, I guess.”

“You aren’t in competition with Chester Charles Smithers is the essential thing you wanted to know,” Warren said. “I can see right through you, fancy boy. You ain’t that complex, either.”

*

Autumn started pushing into winter and they mostly stayed home, though sometimes Warren would go drink at Minnie’s and Mannix would go drink in Red Rock.

Mannix palled around with the horses, which he absolutely talked to, though he still pretended he didn’t. Warren wrote, usually on a board on his knees out in the stables, half-watching Mannix, who was good-boy and good-girling them at random without regard for them being mares or stallions or geldings.

“For somebody who talks about retiring and breeding horses, you sure can't keep them straight."

Chris paused from examining a hoof. “For somebody preoccupied by his own business, major, you pay a lot of mind to _mine_."

“Because I can put together who'd be shelling out the seed money for this stud farm of yours and I ain't wild about losing my shirt in the venture."  He coughed.

Mannix turned around in truth, brow furrowed up. “You been doing a hell of a lot of that.”

“Trying to get you to normalize yourself? I fucking hope so.”

“Coughing.”

He had, and he didn’t like it, and he didn’t like it that it had evidently gotten bad enough for Mannix to take note of it. He coughed again and lifted his shoulders, like _what’re you gonna do about it?_ An indentation between Mannix’s eyebrows he could have put his thumb into. Chris came over to him and sunk down on his knees and heels and laid his cheek against Warren’s thigh, like a dog wanting petting. It was far and away the strangest thing Warren had ever seen him do, and he had seen that boy do some strange things. He put a hand in Chris’s hair and Chris turned his face up.

“Doctor?”

“Nearest one’s a day and a half ride away, and I ain’t doing that on account of a damn cough.”

“Keep an eye on that,” Chris said, rising to his feet, and Warren for the life of him couldn’t figure out of if he was talking to himself or actually giving an instruction, and for Chris’s sake, he decided to believe it was the fucking former.

It worsened, though, and steadily, until one day he woke up and felt like he hadn’t woken up at all: everything seemed like shadows moving over ice and he felt like a bear was sitting on his chest and he couldn’t stop his teeth from chattering. He seemed to be breathing through a wad of wet cotton.

He was dimly aware that Chris was still around, dribbling water into his mouth from the corner of a rag, putting the same rag on his forehead to try to bring his fever down, spooning him mouthfuls of lukewarm broth. He kept saying things, but none of it made any sense. The words swam away like fish. He ebbed in and out. The doorway to the cabin took up the whole wall and then it was a mouse-hole and the mice were nibbling on his feet, tickling his toes with their whiskers, and—and he’d set the fire again and he couldn’t get out. His back ached from the whipping and the prison was on fire, the logs of it turning all around him to hot ash that had crept inside his chest, and he was buried by it, burning in it. He was trapped with dying white men. He could smell meat.

 _Chris Mannix_.

He tried to sit up but couldn’t. Was Chris burning?

“I’m not burning, you unbelievable asshole,” one of the shadows said, thick-voiced. “Now drink some water, damn you. The—the water will help put out the fire.”

“Fancy boy.”

“That’s right. I’m your fancy boy.” A brief, warm press against his brow. “Drink, major.”

“Closest thing to constant.” He swallowed the water down and it felt like the first day of spring opening up down his throat. Closest thing to constant. Chris in the creek-bed, his body slick with soap, or Chris in the bathtub, flexing down, body limber from a spring and summer spent riding, thighs callused in places but soft as calf-leather in others. Warren thinking about the Lincoln letter: that’s a nice touch.

“Yeah, well, this is the closest _you’ve_ gotten to _coherence_. What’s constant?”

Warren was irritated by this. “You know. _Who_.”

“Yeah, I know who.” Water got thumbed away from Warren’s lips. “I know.” A long silence, an acre of it. “You want him?”

Warren intended to answer, but the question escaped him, off again into the acres of silence and darkness, where at least this time around there wasn’t any fire. He had dreams, instead. The cold snap that had killed off men on the march during the war. The first man he’d killed, whose head had burst under the shot like a rotten pumpkin. He’d had a friend back then, or something more than a friend. Rank disappeared among the black soldiers, so it didn’t matter, Marquis had told Laramie with a grin, his teeth against Larry’s throat, that Laramie hadn’t ever made it past corporal ‘cause of his disrespectful mouth, so fucking lippy, so Marquis would put those lips of his to good use. Not that Larry had objected. No, _sir_.

He remembered his boy had smelled like gunpowder. Firebug Laramie from out of Kansas, grinning with a fuse between his teeth, saying that the West knew how to grow its black folk with _real_ blood under their skin, he ran red. Marquis saying there wasn’t a state in the Union that didn’t know that trick and Larry laughing and saying wait and see, wait and see, fool. Larry stroking the crease of Marquis’s ass. Larry taking coats off the dead and smoking them out so they’d smell like the living again.

Larry dead himself, while Warren sat in a Confederate prison. And he’d have burned down the whole country to have kept that from happening.

And he kept remembering winter, winter and winter and winter, snow punctuated by fire, buckshot, corpses like rotten meat, winter and winter and then Chris Mannix and spring, like Mannix was a snowball coming apart into a softness on impact.

“Snowball,” he said, and blinked. The light, pale gold and steady, said early morning. Early morning, autumn. He breathed in: his chest felt less watery than it had before. He lolled his head to the side to see his white boy sleeping beside him and it was Jerome instead.

Jerome folded his newspaper down. The smell of cheap ink in bed—Warren had painted in one of Chris’s broken-backed and bedraggled dime novels. Jerome raised his eyebrows. “Not going so far as to interrogate you, having suffered through the sight of that a couple times now, but—you figure yourself for lucid? Waking up talking about snowballs doesn’t lend me much confidence.”

“I’m as lucid as I can be considering it feels like I got clapped in the head with a horseshoe. Head _and_ the chest.”

“Well, pneumonia will do that to you. Glad to see you’re on the mend.” He laid the paper flat against his lap and stroked Warren down his arm. “Proper color back on you, too. You were starting to look almost like your boy.”

Warren pushed up on his elbows. “Where is he?”

“Probably off putting a gun to the head of that doctor he stashed out at Minnie’s Haberdashery.”

Unsteady breath out. Had he taken Chris for dead? He’d dreamed of Laramie. Of course, that didn’t go any distance towards explaining why Jerome was the one in bed with him.

“I don’t have a real solid recollection of things. You swung around while I was sick?”

“I didn’t swing so much as I rode straight. Mannix paid that stagecoach driver—not Six-Horse Judy, the fellow, OB—four hundred dollars to go out of his way to get me word you were maybe dying and ask would I come.”

“Well, I didn’t die.”

“No, you did not. But you did look it for a while there.”

“Four hundred dollars. It ain’t worth splitting things fifty-fifty with him, he’ll go bankrupt in a year, spending it like that.”

“Mm-hmm.” Jerome eyed him and then he smoothed the newspaper out, his mouth teased up funny somehow. “He’s seemed that way, especially without you doing poorly. I wouldn’t be surprised if he would have shot that doctor he brought out here if you’d passed. You saved a life, waking up the way you did, because he’s been about ready to break out of his skin, waiting on you. He was under the impression you were asking about me, but I figure you for too delirious for that. Or something else.”

“I ain’t opposed to company,” Warren said. “But I don’t remember saying much of anything.”

“Like I thought.”

Warren stretched as much as he could. Wriggled his toes. He felt weak, and he didn’t like it much, and he also felt like he had to piss, and he didn’t like that either, and didn’t want to know what they’d been doing about that while he’d been out of his head. “Can you do me a favor and fetch that dumbass white boy from Minnie’s and drag him back here? Make him give you some of that money he’s throwing around so you can bed down there.”

Jerome gave him a flat kind of smile. “Sure.” He stood and pulled on his boots; gave Warren a pat on the shoulder.

“Come here,” Warren said, “what are you doing, patting me?” He tugged Jerome down and kissed him. Familiar enough—he’d kissed Jerome hundreds of times over the years—but funny now because he’d gotten used to other things. He kept getting stuck on the dumb mechanics of it, how open or closed their lips were, the staleness of his own breath, the way he strained his head up off the pillow and got a crick in his neck. And for all that, it didn’t wipe the strangeness clear of Jerome’s face, either, so maybe it wasn’t just Warren feeling that things had gotten different somehow.

“I’ll see you,” Jerome said, and tipped his hat.

With him gone, there wasn’t much Warren could do besides stare at the walls and take stock of himself. He could breathe—he kept smacking up against a cough sometimes like he’d hit a rock in the road, but he could breathe, generally, and that felt like enough, like just doing that the whole day long would wear him out. He still felt kind of swimmy-headed—thoughts clear but thin and jumbled. If he’d been himself, he’d have asked Jerome to hand him up a book before he left, so he could have something to occupy himself with instead of lying there trying not to piss himself.

Time passed in dribs and drabs and then gobs, big unwieldy stretches, and then Chris fucking Mannix blew in through the door like a storm.

“Major! You’re awake? You’re fucking talking?”

“Awake and talking and in desperate need of a piss. Give me a hand up, will you? Feels like my legs are made out of applesauce.”

“Well, you’ve been off them two weeks,” Chris said, coming around quick to help him up. He had a foolish grin on his face, and even after he had Warren’s arm over his shoulders, he kept glancing his fingers against him at odd little intervals, like he was making sure he was solid. “All right, we won’t try for the outhouse, just the pisspot. And then it’s back to bed, ‘cause I ain’t wearing you out when you’ve only just got your feet underneath you again. That’s a metaphor, apparently,” he added as Warren stumbled a little over an uneven floorboard.

“I regret teaching you what a metaphor is. Not least of which because that ain’t one.”

“Figure of speech then,” Chris said, unruffled.

Warren relieved himself, deciding not to ask about how he’d been doing it the last two weeks, and let Chris help him hobble back to bed. He threw the covers back on the other side, too.

“I don’t want to look up at you the whole time we’re talking. It feels unnatural.”

Chris laid down carefully beside him, like if Warren got jounced he’d cough himself half to death, and turned over to face him. He looked uncharacteristically serious.

Warren closed his eyes. “I heard you’ve been throwing money away.”

“Seeing as how you’re alive and awake to hear about my spending habits in the _first_ place, I’d say it wasn’t thrown away after all.”

“I seemed like to die?”

Chris twitched his head a little. Him being quiet about it was somehow worse—and the sunburn was gone off his face, speaking to the amount of time he’d spent indoors, the amount of time since Warren had last seen him, when he’d scratched the lacy rind of the burn off the back of Chris’s neck and Chris had given himself up for it like a horse getting a rubdown.

“Money well-spent, then,” Warren conceded. “Don’t kill any doctors, though, or John Ruth will see you hang out of pure fucking spite.”

“Fuck John Ruth and fuck his spite. I’d kill the entire damn medical profession if—”

“Oh ho, white boy, _now_ who’s sentimental?”

Burning spots of color on Chris’s cheeks now, like he’d give himself back the touch of sun by setting himself alight from the inside-out. “Well, you looked pretty fucking close to dead is my _point_ , major. I sent word to Jerome, didn’t I?”

He wouldn’t even touch on why the hell Chris had done that, baffling as it was, given the way Chris seethed and hissed around every mention of Jerome like he was a hot iron laid down on wet wool. He was too exhausted to half-pretend to listen. He just wanted to go to sleep and know that when he woke up, he wouldn’t have to hunt about for his fancy boy to reassure his own addled brain that he hadn’t set him alight. Anyway, he wasn’t sure he could sleep right anymore with Mannix out of bed. Maybe that was what had gotten him out of his stupor this time—having Jerome there, when he’d gotten used to somebody else.

“You look tuckered. I mean full-on _wrung-out_ , major, sir.” Chris pressed a hand to his forehead. “Nothing more than warm, though.”

“I ain’t feverish, dumbass, just tired. I don’t have a lot of doing in me at the moment.”

Chris smoothed the covers out over Warren’s chest. “Then you sleep.”

“Then you stay.”

Chris blinked. Pretty eyes, Warren thought, hoped he didn’t say. He couldn’t remember the last time he’d thought anything beautiful, and that was an embarrassing fucking thing to think, lying in the sweat and fug of what maybe could have been his death-bed. It seemed a pitiful thing, to have lived as long as had and to have seen and _done_ all he had, and waste one of his first thoughts on coming back to the world on noticing Chris Mannix, of all people, was beautiful, but it seemed like he was doing it all the same.

“Sure, major,” Chris said. “I’ll stay.”

And he did, because Warren woke up a couple times, just to check that he wasn’t dead yet and still could, and evening and night both Mannix was glued to him.

In the morning, Chris helped him hobble around some more and then watched him like a hawk while he ate some lumpen oatmeal, Chris’s cooking skills not extending that far. Warren put up with it and tried not to have any more epiphanies about eyes or bullshit like that. He was still coughing hard enough sometimes to draw black sparks into the corners of his eyes and leave him breathless and it made him miserable in a sick dog kind of way—he’d have liked to have been plumb out of it for this, too—and after he’d coughed up what felt like a hunk of lung, he laid down on his side and felt frustration and a kind of awful, shameful sadness well up in him. He didn’t like being laid low. It wasn’t his nature.

“If it were you being like this it would be one thing,” he said.

“How do you mean?” Chris said, twitching around from housekeeping task to housekeeping task.

“I mean I don’t like being fucking sick.”

Chris put down the pair of boots he’d picked up, looked at him, and frowned. “Nobody does, major,” he said slowly, like Warren was a child.

But Warren needed himself, and not everybody in the world needed themselves.

“Hey,” Chris half-crooned. “Hey, major. It’s okay. You’re getting better, and pretty soon you’ll be up and at ‘em and picking off bounties with a smile on your face. Don’t get teary.” He climbed up into the bed on Warren’s other side, where there was only a sliver of mattress sticking out, and nestled up against his back, fitting his knees inside the hollows of Warren’s as snugly as a foot into a boot.

Warren didn’t know what was wrong with him, letting himself be cradled like that. Probably the fever had addled him somehow.

It helped a little that Chris himself seemed to like it real well, nuzzling up on him like a horse, so Warren could feel he was doing him a favor by permitting it. “I ain’t been up on you in a _while_ , Marquis. Didn’t want to drive your temperature up.” He broke the word into syllables like he’d only recently learned it and Warren spared some pity for any doctor who’d been in charge of teaching Chris Mannix some scant bit of medicine. “Thought you’d shoot me for sure if I tried to give you another cool bath.”

“Fancy boy, my brains were so cooked I’d have thought you were Robert E. Lee himself. Don’t leave a man in that condition his gun when you’re gonna go shoving him in cold water.”

Chris shrugged. “You didn’t like anybody trying to take it. Besides, there was always the chance you might shoot Jerome by mistake, and that sweetened the pot a little.”

“Why’d you fetch him all this way anyhow? I hope he took a considerable bite of your purse sleeping over at Minnie’s.”

“He did and _how_ , and I _got_ him here because, like I _said already_ , you seemed like you were bloodying your hand knocking at death’s fucking door.”

“You keep saying that like it’s an explanation.” He kind of knew, or he was starting to, but there was some sick value in hearing Mannix tongue-tie himself trying to say it. It was making him feel better.

Then Mannix’s voice cracked and twisted like a green stick of wood and it didn’t make him feel much better at all. He gave his speech all in one long and sloppy breath. “Thought you’d want him here instead of me and I couldn’t give you him instead of me ‘cause there was no way in fuck I was going anywhere so—”

“Quit running your mouth,” Warren advised him. “Only one of you is here. The bed doesn’t fit three, does it?”

“That’s a carpentry problem, major.”

“I built the house and I suppose I could build a bigger fucking bed if I wanted to, Chris Mannix.”

“All right, then,” Chris said, very carefully. Then he soured, but he still didn’t move. “You did that on purpose, you son-of-a-bitch.”

“You know I did.”

“I hope it takes you fucking _forever_ to get better.”

Ultimately, it took him about three weeks, and Jerome left after the first one. Warren sent Chris out to discharge that doctor of his so he and Jerome could talk in some kind of privacy, which was more easily done now that he had strength enough to get to the pisspot on his own. Jerome sat astride the back of a chair and looked him over.

“I know you probably don’t feel it, but you’re back on the road to the land of the living.”

“I can _tell_ it, but no, I don’t feel it any.” He tilted his cup of coffee towards him. “But thanks all the same for your part in getting me there.”

“I didn’t have so much to do with it.”

“Don’t be humble. It looks strange on a man so handsome.”

“And don’t you be charming,” Jerome said, “on account of it sounds strange coming from a man done everything you’ve done.” He leaned forward and patted Warren on the shoulder. His eyes crinkled a little at the corners but his mouth didn’t move. “We had ourselves a good run, didn’t we? And don’t pretend you don’t know why I’m inclined to reminisce.”

“We had some damn good times.”

“I’m still your friend.”

“I wasn’t inclined to doubt you.”

“That was an affirmative statement, because I could choose not to be, but I ain’t. Anyway, I’ll come by in a year or so, little more or less, see how you’re doing. Bedding down at Minnie’s is, I have to tell you, a hell of a lot more comfortable than bedding down here, notwithstanding the obvious, the lack of which I do regret.”

Warren closed his eyes. “What it is, Jerome, is a weird fucking situation.”

“I’ll see you when I see you, Marquis,” Jerome said, and he kissed Warren lightly on the mouth, with the same feel as a seal going down into wax. “And I’ll look for that book of yours, but if I see it out in the world instead of getting it in the mail gratis I’ll be pissed for sure.”

“Don’t worry,” Warren said, meaning it. “I won’t forget about you.”

*

The first time he and Chris fucked on the other side of all that was strange, like he had to learn all over again like his body was a thing that he could feel good in. Chris knelt in front of the chair Warren was in and sucked him off all delicate and slow and soft-mouthed. “Let me make you feel good, major,” he’d said before going down on his knees. He was living up to his word. Warren looked at him, the bob of his head, the shiny pink-and-white of his scalp where it showed through his hair when Warren parted it with his fingers. Once he came, he got Chris up on the bed.

“How do you want it?”

“However you want to give it to me, sir,” Chris said, his hair still sticking every which way. “However you want.”

“No,” Warren said, half-patiently, “I’m asking you.”

Chris blinked and then, with a little color rising in his face, said, “Just touching me’s fine, but look at me?”

“You want me to talk to you any?”

“Yeah, but not rough-like.”

“All right,” Warren said, easing him out and stroking him nice and steady. “Feels good to have you at my fingertips again, fancy boy. I missed you like this, all pretty like this. Easy, easy, don’t come for me yet, not just yet. I want to take some time enjoying the way your cock feels, enjoying the way you look when you’re being good for me. Want to make you feel good, ‘cause it’s been such a long time. You like that?”

“I like that,” Chris said, biting on his lower lip a little. There was still a little bit of Warren’s spunk on his chin and Warren thumbed it up to his mouth for him and Chris sucked it off, traced his tongue along Warren’s thumbprint, hot and needy.

“Something about pumping you off that I don’t mind at all, Chris Mannix. The way you hitch your hips up like you’re eager for me.”

“I been eager for you since the day we fucking met, major.”

“Stands to reason,” Warren said, momentarily amused by him, “you crossing half the country for me and all.”

Chris opened his eyes all the way, earnest. “Now you know that’s not what I _meant_ , major, that was a different kind of _thing_.”

“Hush up and get rewarded for watching over my sickbed.”

“Oh, is _that_ what this is? I thought you were feeling tender.”

“You can dissect my fucking motivations or you can get a handjob with me looking at you and talking nice, Chris, but you can’t get both, so shut up and pick.”

The look on fancy boy’s face made _beautiful_ flicker around Warren’s head again like some kind of moth. Chris lay back against the pillows and chose the handjob. Warren said some embarrassing shit.

*

Winter nipped at their heels. Warren kitted Chris out in some new duds—he tried on some of the fanciest frippery Minnie kept on hand with the holiday stocking-up, had Gemma wind bolts of iridescent emerald and purple around his boy to see how it would look, but though the colors suited him in the main part he came off looking as miserable as a squashed butterfly, like it was leaching all the manhood out of him.

Chris said, “Well, if you like it,” and then kind of trailed off hopelessly.

Gemma and Minnie were a little more at ease with Mannix’s occasional appearance since he’d pulled such a production over Warren taking ill—Charley still didn’t come within a hundred feet unless he needed to—and watching him then, Gemma covered her smile with her hand.

Matter of fact, Warren thought he did look pretty in it, and he luxuriated a little in the thought of peeling those slicks off him in their bed, baring Mannix’s ass against the hot vermillion of the yanked-down trousers like the dot of pollen at the center of some extravagant flower—parading him around got-up like a _bought-and-paid-for_ little trinket of a twist—but he couldn’t make it work with the downright misery on Chris’s face.

“Nah,” he said. “It’s a little much too much, and I ain’t convinced you’re pretty enough to not end up looking like a horse dressed up in satin in it.”

“We’ve got other stuff would suit you better,” Gemma said, very tentatively giving Mannix a consoling pat on the shoulder, maybe figuring that it was nearing Christmas, after all.

He gave her a big-eyed look. White boy was developing a distinct fascination with getting liked by black folks. Warren had to shoulder some of the blame for that, he supposed.

“I’ll reiterate,” Warren said, as Gemma went off to get some other choices for him, “if you do anything to make these folks regret opening their doors for you—”

“Damn, major, after everything—”

“There’s a difference between me and them and I ain’t talking about a bent towards pecker or any number of years in the war or what have you, I’m talking basic level decency. You and me are one way and they’re another, you follow me, white boy? I’m careful around them, too.”

Chris took that in. With the finery stripped off him and him just standing around in his undershirt—once white, now weathered to a kind of grayish cream—and the skin-tight pants Warren bought him for reasons that he didn’t feel needed any explanation, he didn’t look fancy; looked serious, like the partner Warren had called him to John Ruth way back when, when he’d mostly meant it as cover for what they really were.

“All right, major,” Mannix said. “I can be careful.”

Gemma came back with more dark blue and Chris kindled for it. “Yeah, yeah, that’s what we want, _hell yeah_ , deck me out like we’re bookends. I like this blue shit, and it holds up good, too.”

“What do you know about bookends?” Warren said. “Only books you own are mine.”

“He’s surly because I stopped reading right in the middle of one until he’d get me _properly_ outfitted again,” Chris said to Gemma, all confiding-like. “Don’t pay him no mind. Major and me own whole shelves of things.”

“ _Things_.”

“ _Books_.”

“Anyway,” Gemma said hastily, “this color looks good on him, Major Warren. We’ve got wool, too, if you want sweaters, things like that.”

Warren peeled off a couple bills for her and said he’d trust her judgment on it all, and then he pitched Mannix out the door to go drink in Red Rock.

Minnie, irritated, said, “I don’t know why you keep shooing that boy’s money out of here. You can tell him he doesn’t have to go all the way to fucking _Red Rock_ and drink with white folks if he doesn’t want to.”

“I figured that one stretch you had him stewing here—”

“Two stretches. Once when you were off with Jerome and once when you were maybe dying.”

“—would be enough for you.”

“Enough for me to know he may have been trouble but ain’t trouble now and enough for me to know that as long as he’s not half-heartbroken and crying in his whiskey over you, he’s not the worst kind of company washes up here. Hell, I’ve taken in worse. Sandy _Smithers’s_ son drank in here a month or so back.”

“Of that I’m keenly aware, since he came to kill me not long after. A warning would be appreciated, when shit like that happens.”

“You seem to have come out ahead. Major Marquis always lands on his feet.” But she poured him a drink on the house and brought it over to him. “I should have considered the likelihood of that, you’re right. It ever happens again, I’ll get word to you.” She smiled and flicked him on the shoulder—that was the kind of friendliness he’d tried, maybe badly, to explain to Mannix, the kind that was so reflexive and natural in her, the kind he didn’t have in himself. “Hell, take it as a compliment. The more I like you, the more I forget how many people want to kill your ass.”

“Compliment indeed,” Warren said. He toasted her and drank. “Anyway, I needed him out the door especially today because he seems the type to sulk if he misses out on some kind of Christmas trinket. And don’t make that ain’t-you-sweet face.”

“This is my glad-I’m-getting-you-to-spend-some-money face, and you just don’t know it ‘cause you never spent a penny on Jerome. Which is why he didn’t much mind leaving you, if you want my opinion on it.”

“I don’t,” Warren said. “I wouldn’t mind it on the trinket, though. See, the clothes come as kind of part of the deal. Presents like the holster are outside that.”

“You’re doing good getting her advice on this, major,” Sweet Dave hollered over from his chair. “Minnie’s the best gift-giver around. Shit, she gave me this chair.”

“And don’t I regret it,” Minnie said. “But Dave’s right, Major Marquis, that’s the trick of it, you gotta get them something they like and you don’t, so even if it doesn’t seem like much, they know you meant it right. See, I knew Dave liked to sit on his ass all the time, so I invested in one honey of a chair, stupid decision though it turned out to be. What’s he got a taste for that you don’t?”

“I’m behind the best parts of that motherfucker,” Warren said, “so not much that’s worth speaking of. But he likes those dime novels a fair bit more than I do, and candy.”

“Well, you can’t buy him candy,” Dave said. “You do that all the time anyway.”

“What I could do,” Warren said thoughtfully, “is take him somewhere, rent out the floor of a bathhouse again, he did that once and liked it.”

“Seeing as you can’t buy a trip from me, I consider this whole line of thinking worse than useless,” Minnie said. “I’m charging some novels against you anyway. Take them or leave them lay, but it’s going on your tab anyhow as a cost for us all having to listen to you hem and haw over it.”

“New quilt, too, while you’re at it.”

“I’m warming up to you again, Major Marquis.”

When it got close to the end of December but wasn’t Christmas true and proper—he didn’t think either one of them wanted to admit to having that kind of close eye on the calendar as far as gift-giving went—he threw the new quilt on the bed and put Mannix on his hands and knees, hands on the blue squares, knees on the red, and they had themselves a time, Mannix whining high and needy because he wanted to come and was also particular about what happened to the quilt he was already ostentatiously considering his own. Warren finally yanked the corner of it down and finished him off against the sheets.

Chris curled up against him, a hum in his throat like a cat’s purr. “I got something for you too, _as_ it happens. In the woodpile.”

Warren snorted. “You’re not gonna get up for it?”

“ _Damn,_ major, do I got to do everything? You just fucked my fucking legs out from under me.”

“You can’t tell, with your head down like that, but I don’t look anything like pleased.”

Chris dragged himself up and to the woodpile, bitching all the way, and then came back with a stack of canvas-wrapped books that couldn’t pretend to be anything else: they looked heavy, though, and Warren’s heart fairly leapt in his chest to see the promise of something substantial. He let Chris drop them against his hands.

“Those are like to break your wrists, major,” Chris said. “And I ain’t bought them just for heft, either.”

Warren unwrapped them. _The Three Musketeers_ and _Les Misérables._ He’d read half of the latter once, back during the war—he’d found a nearly burned-up copy of it in the dirt of Atlanta and had spent years trying to figure out the ending. Lee had cut some of it to ribbons, too, he’d heard, chopped out every bit that might have made his soldiers queasy; what he was holding didn’t look to be expurgated any. _Three Musketeers_ —Dumas, now. He was black. Warren had seen pictures of him.

He didn’t know how much of that Chris had done on purpose and he was afraid to ask—it seemed best not to find out how much he’d let Chris Mannix know about him.

“You like them?” Chris said nervously. “They’re real books—not like your novel ain’t gonna be real once it’s done, but real like—”

Warren advised him to shut up, and then shut him up himself, tasting the last of the not-really-Christmas candy on his tongue, licking sugar and peppermint off his mouth. Chris started grinning halfway through; Warren could feel the shape of his smile.

“While the weather stays clear, I thought we’d ride out a little and get somewhere we haven’t been yet. Bigger town. _Bathhouse_ kind of town. How’d you like a hotel with a hot shave and a soak on Christmas morning, fancy boy?”

“Marquis, this need you got to win every kind of exchange ain’t half so appealing as you _think_ it is.”

“Being knowledgeable of you at this point,” Warren said, “I’ll decipher that out to a yes.”

About the only other thing that mattered that winter happened on the way back from that trip, and Warren barely liked recollecting it, it was such a fucking embarrassment, but they were coming home through the snow on Boxing Day all rested and lavender-scented with their bellies full of steak and fried potatoes, Warren’s head full of Jean Valjean, his beard cropped close and soft from some kind of fancy oil, when all of a sudden and out of fucking nowhere, Jody fucking Domingre passed by them riding the prettiest gray horse Warren had ever laid eyes upon. When anybody’s got thirty thousand dollars on their head, bounty hunters spend one hell of a long time scrutinizing their sheets, so Warren and Mannix both pegged him at once. Chris got so wide-eyed it was like he thought God Himself had given him a Christmas present only one day late.

They slowed the horses to a trot and turned around.

“Ah, friend?” Chris called out. Warren liked to make use of the stupid-sounding friendliness of Chris Mannix’s voice whenever he could, because, like it or not, Chris was better than he was at getting folks to turn towards them so they could do one last confirmation on the face before they planted a bullet in them for good. “I’m sorry, but we’re _unfamiliar_ with this road—trying to get to Red Rock? Did you maybe come from there, or were you—”

Fuck Chris Mannix’s open-handedness, though, because Domingre clued in quick—spun around like a top and leveled up his pistol and then a noise like a thunderclap knocked Chris off his horse.

Warren shot back before he could even think to aim and then he was down on the ground, trying to unhook Chris’s boot from his stirrup before the horse dragged him any further.

Chris came up spitting snow, scraped half raw on his right side, his arm spouting blood like he’d sprung a leak. Warren stripped the coat off him anyway, for some reason, looking him over to make sure he was mostly whole.

“I’m fine, I’m fine—oh, major, _shit fucking fire, major_!”

“What?” He flattened his hand against Chris’s stomach, which seemed all right to him, but he was seeing blood everywhere by then. He felt like all the breath he’d had in him was still outside his chest somewhere hovering.

“You shot that asshole right in the fucking face is _what_! How are we gonna collect bounty on him like that? He could be John Wilkes Fucking Booth for all they’re supposed to know!”

Warren tried to get his eyes to focus on something other than Chris and, as best as he could manage it, concluded that that wasn’t inaccurate. He’d blown Jody Domingre’s head nearly off his shoulders. His skull was caved in like a pumpkin somebody’d put his boot through.

“Thirty thousand dollars,” Chris near-about moaned. He grabbed at his hair with his good hand and hobbled up to his feet.

Warren stayed down there in the snow, trying to get back to something like normal.

Mannix went berserk on the corpse, kicking it until Warren figured they couldn’t have identified it by Jody Domingre’s ribs or birthmarks or anything else either. “Thirty. Thousand. _Dollars_ , major! We could have _retired_ on that shit! We could have—we could have gone to fucking _Mexico_ and I’d have sucked you off with my feet in the motherfucking _ocean_! On some kind of beach!”

He didn’t even seem to mind bleeding all over the place. As far as Warren was concerned, the absolute least he could have done was acted like his arm was bothering him a little more than that.

After he’d worked his frustrations out on desecrating the body, Chris turned to Warren and said, only slightly calmer, ‘cause he never really did run calm, “What in the _hell_ happened to your aim, major?”

 _I thought you were dead and I wasn’t thinking about him at all_ was no kind of answer for him to give, and neither was _I wanted to blow that motherfucker off the skin of the world_.

“Horse jogged my elbow,” he said instead.

“Well, that horse owes us _thirty thousand dollars_.” Chris shook his head. “Anyways, could you bandage me up? I suppose we must not be meant for riches, but I’d like to keep both arms if the day don’t draw a line at _that_ , too.” He hitched his clothes down in the dirt and held up his arm. “This one’s unlucky, is what I’m figuring. Look at that. Bullet-hole not one inch away from where the last one went in, you remember that?”

Warren remembered. He remembered seeing right away back then that Mannix hadn’t been really hurt at all.

“Feels like a long time ago,” he said.

*

It was all the way into next June before they happened upon John Ruth again, in the company of some manacled plug-ugly fellow named Grouch Douglas who, John Ruth said, had earned the split lip and bloodied nose he’d got and then some. “Being that he used to ride with Jody Domingre, who’s up and vanished off the face of the earth. Unless _you two_ have pocketed the bounty on him.”

They’d agreed that spreading word of accidentally blowing off an outlaw’s head wouldn’t help their reputations any, so Warren said, “We ain’t,” and Chris said, “We _sure_ ain’t,” maybe a little too much in unison.

Ruth eyed them with some suspicion but evidently decided neither one of them was dressed like they’d come into that kind of money. “Anyway, reckon it’s a good thing I ran into you all, what with the news.”

“Who are they, anyhow?” Douglas said lazily, plucking some tobacco out of a bag for himself to chew.

John Ruth knocked the butt of his rifle into his jaw in what was, all things considered, more a love tap than anything else—Warren had seen how hard that white man could hit when he really intended to lay a blow. “None of your damn business is who they are, but that’s Major Marquis Warren, formerly of the Union Cavalry, _correspondent_ of President Abraham Lincoln, and his—friend. Chris Mannix. Now shut the fuck up and work your mouth chewing instead of talking, you got me?”

“I got you,” Douglas said, unruffled even as a line of blood streaked its way down his neck. He tucked the wad of tobacco into his lower lip and closed his eyes.

“Well, he’s an ugly fucking spooky one to be traveling with,” Chris said, marveling at Douglas like he was some World’s Fair exhibit. “Like leading around some kind of Sasquatch on a chain.”

“He’s worth a good bit, I remember correctly,” Warren said. “Hell of a find, even if he ain’t Domingre.”

Ruth nodded. “Well, we all make do in the end. He’s docile enough seventy-five, eighty percent of the time anyhow, hasn’t been any trouble getting to Red Rock. I see you two on my tail heading out of here, though, I won’t be so friendly.”

“We got our own business out further east,” Warren said. They didn’t, but he wasn’t in a mood to try to allay Ruth’s suspicions any other way, and besides, there were bounties out east as well as anywhere else. “What’s the news you had for us, anyhow?”

“Hell, I almost just tipped my hat to you and went on my way again. What I wanted to tell you is Erskine Mannix is deader than a door-nail, has been for well over a year now—what, not this January but last?” He took a crumpled letter out of his jacket pocket and got his spectacles, too, a whole production lasting almost a minute. “January 21.”

“But that’s only three days after he—” Chris shook his head. He’d gotten gray-faced. “Major, that’s _three days_ after I saw him last, when he turned me out. I wasn’t even out of the _state_ by then, I was holed up somewhere drinking myself half-blind.”

Douglas looked up with some kind of interest. “What’d he turn you out for?”

John Ruth knocked him on the ground.

“Point is,” Ruth continued, “seemed like a waste after I found that out to go around talking up any kind of scandal. You,” with a look at Mannix, “the world could keep spinning just fine without, but the major I’m somewhat more particular over. But condolences on the loss.”

“I see,” Douglas said from the dirt, wiping tobacco and blood off his mouth. “Cocksucking.”

“Just ‘cause I can’t reach you right from up here don’t mean you can get lippy,” Ruth said, “because if it comes to that, I’ll bend down, and if I bend down, I ain’t the only one gonna be sorry about it.”

“That was before I ever even _met_ you,” Chris said, directly to Warren, like Douglas and John Ruth both were nothing but pictures in a book. He looked near about woozy enough to faint, closer to it than Warren had seen him from either gunshot, so, with a sigh—and an uncomfortable tightness around his own chest like a band stretched rigid over his heart that probably just meant he was getting old and therefore un-fucking-happy about any kind of sudden change—he braced Mannix a little and tipped his hat to John Ruth.

“We’re obliged for the account. What was it, old age, gunshot, or plain bastard meanness?”

“Seems like he caught a bullet right between his eyes in some kind of shootout over him letting his son walk straight out of camp. Supposition being the least Erskine could have done was gelded him first.”

Warren tightened his hand on Chris’s shoulder. “It ain’t bad news. Is it, Chris?”

Chris gave him a toothy kind of smile that seemed unmoored from his face, floating out there Cheshire-like. “No, sir, it ain’t.”

That seemed to unnerve Ruth some, so he said, “Well, I suppose maybe I’ll bump into you again. One of you, anyhow,” and then he’d lugged up Douglas again and pitched him back into the coach.

Warren watched it bump its way down the road, throwing up a hell of a lot of dust. When it was nothing more than a dim little speck on the horizon, he had to acknowledge that Chris was making some kind of uncomfortable choking sounds, and he had to further acknowledge that it was going to sour him some on John Ruth if every time they ran into him, he aggravated Chris Mannix to tears. He couldn’t say he liked having come to that particular place in his life but it seemed like he’d done it despite himself. He found a handkerchief and passed it over.

“Major, we use this for jism.”

“Well, it’s clean right now.”

Chris scrutinized it, being awfully picky for a grown man getting publically leaky over his asshole of a daddy, and then availed himself of it. Warren found himself looking at the clouds—they were low that afternoon and grayish, getting ready for a wholehearted midsummer storm. It’d been his plan to get them into the nearest hotel before rain struck and now, what with Mannix being all sniffly, it’d probably take longer. He wasn’t thinking about anything other than that, he told himself, because he wasn’t worried about anything.

“I hope you ain’t expecting me to cry out of fellow-feeling with you or something,” Warren said finally.

“Why in the hell would _you_ cry? I don’t even rightly know why _I_ am.”

“Being generous, I’d say you’re dumbass enough to still have some kind of kinship-tug. Being _more_ generous, I’d say you regret not having killed him yourself.”

“I’d like to see your idea of _less_ generosity, then.”

He wouldn’t have put clouds like that in his own book and so he was irritated even more by them being there, looking like they wanted to spell out doom. “That you came all the way the fuck up here for no reason. Which you probably aren’t even smart enough to put together.” He took the handkerchief back—Mannix had gotten it all soggy—and put it in his pocket. “We’re gonna want to keep riding together at least until the next town because I’m not gonna spread all the packs out across the road just so you can pick through it all and separate out what’s yours.”

“Either I’m reeling from a loss like I’m about concussed, major, or you aren’t making a lick of sense.”

“Well,” Warren said, “you got what you wanted, didn’t you?”

Mannix worked that idea over like he’d borrowed a pinch of Grouch Douglas’s chaw. He didn’t look too happy about it.

“We got to keep riding anyways.”

“Probably the first sensible thing’s ever come out of your mouth. Come to think of it, though, you’re just repeating me, so that explains it.”

Chris slanted his mouth and remounted. It took another hour’s riding before they found a decent hotel that would accommodate the both of them, and the band around Warren’s chest didn’t feel like it had eased up any: two whiskeys loosened it a little, but not enough. He went on up to the room to see if Mannix had flung their shit all across the room, which was the only explanation he could think of for Mannix not being downstairs drinking with him.

Turned out Mannix hadn’t gotten any further than kicking one of the bags halfway to the wall and spilling warrant sheets everywhere and getting a frown on his face more furious than the frankly pussy thunderstorm stirring itself up outside.

“What the fuck happened here? You let a hurricane into our room?”

“I had an epiphany,” Chris Mannix said, pronouncing it epi-fanny on account of he’d only learned it from Warren writing it down.

Warren was a little too distracted to correct him on it. “I’m all ears.”

“Well, it’s like I _said_ , Marquis, back when we first got started. A fancy boy does it because he likes it. And he don’t need no other reason than that.”

“That’s assuming anybody will have his ass,” Warren said, thinking he ought to at least make it known this place didn’t water its whiskey down any, as hard as it felt like it was hitting him, when he could usually keep his head through half a bottle at least. “And I been meaning to tell you, you’re too fucking old to be anybody’s fancy boy, and you ain’t that pretty, either. Presumptuous, too, that shit you do sometimes where you figure I’m not gonna notice you calling me Marquis. But that aside, you have _got_ to pick this shit up off the floor. The last thing we want is people knowing the kind of living we make off this, or we’ll get our throats cut and our wallets lifted right off our belts.”

Chris raised his eyebrows and came over to him, doing that funny-looking sinuous kind of walk he probably thought looked seductive or some shit like that. He’d taken a tumble two days before and he was still scraped raw on one side of his neck and jaw, and Warren had been right to say he wasn’t really young, not with those silky little crow’s feet at the corners of his eyes, and he still looked kind of tired, what with having had his daddy die and all. All the same, Warren didn’t mind looking at him.

“Prettier than Grouch Douglas,” Chris said.

Warren tilted his head. “I’ll give you that much.”

“Prettier than Chester Charles Smithers.”

“By a bit.”

“You really call things off with Jerome?”

“That’s a low blow and you know it, fancy boy,” Warren said, unbuttoning Chris’s trousers and slipping his hand inside. “Bringing up the most nonsensical fucking thing I ever did.”

Chris closed his eyes. “But you _did_ it, though. _And_ you just called me fancy boy again.”

“At this point,” Warren said, “it’s gone on long enough it seems worth keeping it up,” and he pushed Chris Mannix down on the bed in a way that probably shook sawdust onto the bar downstairs, but fuck the folks downstairs anyhow.

*

Warren finished up the novel in September. Stacking all the pages together, it didn’t have the same weight on paper that it had in his head, but he’d toyed with the last chapter so much he’d come close to losing track of the whole damn English language, and he had to stop sometime. He laid the pen down and massaged his hand.

Chris was already in bed, but he’d been sitting up with _Three Musketeers_ on his lap getting droopier and droopier as it’d gotten darker, and when he heard the pen hit the desk, he wriggled up straight-backed again. “Done?”

“Done.”

“Done like _for-real_ done?”

“Done like I wrote _finis_ at the bottom of the page. Which is French for done.”

“Can I read it?”

Warren brought it over. “Out loud,” he said, climbing into bed, too, “because I need to be sure it all came together right,” but he had to admit that he wanted to hear that reflective, appreciative little pause Mannix got sometimes when he read over something he particularly liked. Say he was only as good as his audience, which sometimes spelled trouble for him—hell, for both of them. But not always.


End file.
